Evolution is the term for the ongoing process by which a species slowly alters to compete better in its environment. In a cold area, for instance, creatures that happen to have a little more fur than others will survive better and live longer. This natural selection allows them to live longer and leave more descendants, some of which will just happen to have a little more fur, and so on. Over millions of years, a species will slowly change, as the original line is bred out of existence, beaten at the survival game by those better suited for it. That hypothetical land may have been warmer in the past, or perhaps population pressure or predators may have driven the animals there from other lands. Competition (for food and other necessities) is what drives evolution. Sometimes evolution of entirely different species has progressed in tandem, as predators became more efficient hunters and prey became more efficient hiders or runners in response... which caused the predators to become still better hunters.

We humans have often purposely induced evolutionary changes, by breeding animals and plants to meet our needs. Cows, sheep, dogs and corn are examples of artificial selection, where our requirements replaced the natural environment as the criteria for success. We've specifically bred dogs for hunting, herding sheep, pulling sleds, killing rats or looking pretty, depending on our needs. We've selected cows for giving far more milk than normal and sheep for producing thick, fluffy wool, until the original versions of both animals are nearly vanished. Corn cannot even reproduce anymore without human intervention. If we can artificially effect such changes in less than ten thousand years, imagine what can occur naturally over the course of tens or hundreds of millions of years, as land masses have moved about the Earth and ice ages have come and gone.

But all members of a species are not identical. Natural variations exist despite the most rigorous breeding programs. Ears of corn are not all alike, nor are all German Shorthair Pointers. More variations exist within a naturally-evolved organism. Fewer variations, of course, would exist in the code of a cloned or genetically modified organism. Should the environment change radically in some way, making it more difficult for most members of a certain species to survive, it's possible that at least some members of that species might have a trait or combination of traits that enables them to live on. Their descendants, of course, would also carry those traits... and eventually, an altered version of that species might even prosper in the changed environment. That's evolution.

Evolution takes place in other areas as well. The business world is a prime example. Businesses, like organisms, compete for the available market. Sometimes they're "eaten" by other businesses. Sometimes they become too specialised and die off when conditions change too quickly. (Buggy whips, anyone?) Political parties also compete with each other to succeed in the current environment, whatever it is. Sometimes they prosper... and sometimes they die out. Do you know any current members of the Whig or Tory parties? Would anyone admit to being a member of the Know-Nothing party today?

The Democrats are finally beginning to realise that they're under evolutionary pressure. For instance, 83% of Americans are Christians of one variety or another, yet the loudest voices in the Democratic party are virulently anti-Christian. While Bill Clinton exhorts Democrats to speak more openly about their faith, Michael Moore – who sat in a box seat with former President Jimmy Carter at the Democratic National Convention – mocks the states that voted for Bush in 2004 as "Jesusland" along with most of the far Left. Some complained that Americans had "democratically voted for an extremist Christian regime." Some, like columnist Mark Morford, have lost all pretense of sanity or moderation. "This just in," Morford writes, "millions of moderate Republicans and gay-terrified evangelical Christians and intellectually numbed conservative parents who thought they were doing some sort of good by blindly voting for Dubya and hence protecting their wee ones from swarthy Islamic evildoers who want to steal their kids' Kraft Lunchables and nuke Disneyland all should be emerging from a deep fog of savage denial any minute now." I'm not sure the Left understands who's really in denial here.

9/11 was a catastrophic event that accelerated the changes already taking place in America over the last several decades. The Republicans seem pretty well suited to the political environment, but the Democrats -- a party more or less controlled by the Liberal wing -- are finding it difficult to adapt. Their biggest problem is that instead of being a party with a solid stance and message, standing for what the majority of Americans believe in, the Democrats are a loose alliance of fringe groups and special interests. So many people vote Democratic on single issues -- abortion, for instance, or gay "marriage" -- that if the Democratic party altered its stance on any of these or many other issues, they would lose many of their members. They've backed themselves into a corner by pandering to the far-Left fringe. Though they like to crow that they only lost the 2004 election by a few percent of the popular vote, the fact is that 70% of those who voted for John Kerry were really just voting against President Bush. John Kerry's campaign tried to use camouflage -- sometimes literally, as in the Great Ohio Duck Hunt of 2004 -- to disguise Kerry's Liberalism, to no avail. Without the Bush-hatred, Liberals will have no way to win a majority vote. The Democrats need to recognise that, and stop letting them control the party.

I have been predicting a split among the Democrats after losing this election since the beginning of 2004, but only time will tell whether they will split, evolve, and survive... or join the Whigs as historical footnotes. Is there enough "genetic" variation within the Democratic party to allow it to survive? Will moderate Democrats like Joe Lieberman, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor and maybe even the just-retired John Breaux and Zell Miller form a new, survivable core for the Democrats? Or will the Hillary Clintons, Ted Kennedys and Nancy Pelosis, along with Hollywood halfwits and other elitist Liberals, continue to drag them towards the Left and extinction?