Proceedings, American Philosophical Society (vol. 103, no. 1, 1959)American Philosophical Society |
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Popular passages
Page 15 - On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest.
Page 15 - As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, Jif it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected.
Page 15 - Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us.
Page 150 - On my return home, it occurred to me — in 1837 — that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it. After five years' work I allowed myself to speculate on the subject, and drew up some short notes.
Page 12 - In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some ape-like creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point when the term "man
Page 126 - ... although of the utmost importance to the welfare of the being, are almost valueless to the systematist. For animals, belonging to two most distinct lines of descent, may readily become adapted to similar conditions, and thus assume a close external resemblance ; but such resemblances will not reveal — will rather tend to conceal their blood-relationship to their proper lines of descent.
Page 123 - Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes. The hopelessness of the attempt has been expressly admitted by Owen in his most interesting work on the "Nature of Limbs." On the ordinary view of the independent creation of each being, we can only say that so it is; — that it has pleased the Creator to construct all the animals and plants in each great class on a uniform plan; but this...
Page 140 - Why should this be so? why should the species which are supposed to have been created in the Galapagos Archipelago, and nowhere else, bear so plain a stamp of affinity to those created in America? There is nothing in the conditions of life, in the geological nature of the islands, in their height or climate, or in the proportions in which the several classes are associated together, which...
Page 123 - What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern, and should include similar bones, in the same relative positions...
Page 64 - I have been considering the terrible problem. Let me first say that no man could have more earnestly wished for the success of Natural Selection in regard to sterility than I did, and when I considered a general statement (as in your last note) I always felt sure it could be worked out, but always failed in detail, the cause being, as I believe, that Natural Selection cannot effect what is not good for the individual, including in this term a social community.