Darwin gave a widely accepted scientific argument for what Rousseau had already argued from a

different direction, that humans and other animal species have no truly fixed nature, at least in the
very long term. However, he also gave modern biology a new way of understanding how human
nature does exist in a normal human time-frame, and how it is caused.
Freud believed that the Marxists were right to focus on what he called "the decisive influence
which the economic circumstances of men have upon their intellectual, ethical and artistic
attitudes." But he thought that the Marxist view of the class struggle was too shallow, assigning to
recent centuries conflicts that were actually primordial. Behind the class struggle, according to
Freud, there stands the struggle between father and son, between established clan leader and
rebellious challenger.