Charles Darwin's notion of the survival of the fittest remains a sacred idea in science--no indeed, in modern Western culture. The imagined war of every organism against every other represents a profound enculturation of science, prejudicing theories and obscuring the facts. The evidence, however, clearly shows that nature is not competitive but cooperative.

"Charles Darwin was a master of metaphor, and much of his success may be attributed to his uncanny feel for timely comparisons that virtually compel understanding," according to Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. The principal metaphors used by Darwin were the struggle for existence and natural selection. Gould finds these "wonderfully apt and poetic."