Gilson From Aristotle to Darwin

From Aristotle to Darwin and back again: a journey in final causality.

http://books.google.co.za/books?id=pPPJZrz8GBAC&pg=PA171&lpg=PA171&dq=darwin+tautology+aristotle&source=bl&ots=dAbSga3M-R&sig=8lEnr0nEVVz1rba3ohGRNowijkc&hl=en&ei=6B_0S5zrC5Tu0wSwouCTDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDsQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false p.172

Quoting OoS: "..... In the first place, varieties, even strongly-marked ones, though having somewhat of the character of species--as is shown by the hopeless doubts in many cases how to rank them--yet certainly differ far less from each other than do good and distinct species. Nevertheless according to my view, varieties are species in the process of formation, or are, as I have called them, incipient species.  How, then, does the lesser difference between varieties become augmented into the greater difference between species?  That this does habitually happen, we must infer from most of the innumerable species throughout nature presenting well-marked differences; whereas varieties, the supposed prototypes and parents of future well-marked species, present slight and ill-defined differences....."

Gilson writes: "...Every attentive reader of Darwin is familiar with the expressions good species or ''true species, the good species implicitly contrasted with the bad, the true species with the false...."

We can see here the good/bad dichtomy from Gandalf the tribal wizard, Sumerian pagan fire/water fight religions, Empedocles and Democritus with his good bad atoms, reformulated for us differently by Darwin with his good rabbit adapted to the environment. It seems I finally figured out what "you are adapted to your environment" means. After the fight between the good and bad atoms, the good atom was adapted to its environment. Which just shows that no sentence has a meaning, only the ideas Democritus projected with "adapted" had meaning.