Abstract

This essay counters postmodern social scientists J. Baird Callicott, Alston Chase, and William Cronon, who impugn the wilderness concept as nothing essential but merely a social construct. These and similar postmodernists lack sufficient knowledge of elementary biology, so that they fail to understand the difference between artificial selection and natural selection, the latter of which is the distinguishing feature of wildness. For this reason, they fail to grasp the evolutionary significance of wilderness.