But furthermore — and this is perhaps Darwin's greatest contribution — he developed a set
of new principles that influence the thinking
of every person: the living world, through evolution, can be explained without recourse to supernaturalism; essentialism or typology is invalid, and we must adopt population thinking, in which all individuals are
unique (vital for education and the refutation
of racism); natural selection, applied to social groups, is indeed sufficient to account for the origin and maintenance
of altruistic ethical systems; cosmic teleology, an intrinsic process leading life automatically to ever greater perfection, is fallacious, with all seemingly teleological phenomena explicable by purely material processes; and determinism is thus repudiated, which places our
fate squarely in our own evolved
hands.
As Elisa develops a
unique bond with her new friend, she soon learns that its
fate and very survival lies in the
hands of a hostile government agent and a marine biologist.