"Natural selection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said of the credit due to other scientists for investigation or discovery in natural selection, the preeminence of Darwin in this field is undisputed. If of any scientific book it can be said that its appearance was "epoch-making" it is true of Darwin's work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... contrast to Lamarckianism, so called,—although it did not originate in the mind of the noted man of science whose name it bears,—is the doctrine of natural selection, first proposed in its full form by Charles Darwin. This doctrine presents a wholly natural description of the method by which organisms evolve, putting all of the emphasis upon the congenital causes of variation, ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... has rigid instincts and an a priori mind is probably very imperfectly adapted to the world he comes into: his organs cannot be moulded by experience and use; unless they are fitted by some miraculous pre-established harmony, or by natural selection, to things as they are, they will never be reconciled with them, and an eternal war will ensue between what the animal needs, loves, and can understand and what the outer reality offers. So long as such a creature lives—and his life will be difficult and short—events will continually ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... ecclesiastical authority or tradition and the system of Christian doctrine as such, possess no force. By illustrations from other spheres, let us make clear what is meant by such dynamical elements of Christianity. The doctrine of the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection was put before the world by Darwin in 1859, and within the half century has been accepted almost as an axiom by the whole civilised world. Undoubtedly that doctrine has proved itself dynamical. On the other hand, a few years earlier than the publication of The ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... preadaptation and form a finality.[38] Their importance cannot be exaggerated. Thanks to his power of preadaptation, the being endowed with intelligence acquires an enormous advantage over everything which does not reason. No doubt, as has been shrewdly remarked, natural selection resembles a finality, for it ends in an adaptation of beings to their surroundings. There is therefore, strictly speaking, such a thing as finality without intelligence. But the adaptation resulting therefrom is a crude one, and proceeds by the elimination ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... instance of barrel-organism that is present to our minds just now is the Darwinian theory of the development of species by natural selection, of which we hear so much. This is nothing new, but a rechauffee of the old story that his namesake, Dr. Darwin, served up in the end of the last century to Priestley and his admirers, and Lord Monboddo had cooked in the beginning ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... everything it is because of its necessity to attract insect friends or to repel its foes - its form, mechanism, color, markings, odor, time of opening and closing, and its season of blooming being the result of natural selection by that special insect upon which each depends more or less absolutely for help in perpetuating its species - it seems fully time that the vitally important and interesting relationship existing between our common wild flowers and their winged benefactors should be presented ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Now, how did the finger begin to elongate? A little lengthening would be absolutely no good, as the cracks in the trees are 2 inches or 3 inches deep. It must have varied from the ordinary length to one twice as long at once. There is no other way. Where does natural selection come in? In this, as in scores of other instances, it shows the ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... time. In that I found myself placed, a creature relatively infinitesimal, needing and struggling. It was clear to me, by a hundred considerations, that I in my body upon this planet Earth, was the outcome of countless generations of conflict and begetting, the creature of natural selection, the heir of good and ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... little ones, too old for the nursery and too young for the school, demanded some adequate provision for their care while their mothers were at work. In the community the one person best suited to fill any requirement was directed to the undertaking by natural selection. This was one of the normal though scarcely recognized results of the organization of industry Among the many workers there was always one who could do whatever was to be done better than any of the others, and to ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... of the present abstract being thus understood, I shall start at the beginning of my subject by very briefly describing the theory of natural selection. It is a matter of observable fact that all plants and animals are perpetually engaged in what Mr. Darwin calls a "struggle for existence." That is to say, in every generation of every species a great many more individuals ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... correlation, the power of movement has been transferred to the flower-peduncles from the young internodes, and sensitiveness from the young petioles. But to whatever cause these capacities are due, the case is interesting; for, by a little increase in power through natural selection, they might easily have been rendered as useful to the plant in climbing, as are the flower-peduncles (hereafter to be described) ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... but also painters and novelists and men and women of varied distinction. The city palpitates with life and ambition and hope and promise; it attracts the great and the successful, and those who admire greatness and success. The force of natural selection is at work here as everywhere; and it is rapidly concentrating in our small island whatever is finest, most progressive, and best ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... faculties for the benefit of the race we shall employ others that are higher to even greater effect. In other case it is not worth the effort of acquiring, nor is it likely that anybody of a radically selfish nature will take the trouble to acquire it. Natural selection is the fine sieve which the gods use in their prospecting. The gross material ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... mass of facts crushed and pounded into shape, rather than held together by the ordinary medium of a logical bond." The impossibility of a scientific test is admitted, for vast periods of time in the infinite past are claimed for the work of natural selection. Countless ages form the basis of the system, without which it could not have brought about the present order of things. But an infinite series of life forms upon our earth could not be possible, for it has been shown, allowing ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of "Natural Selection" and "Inheritance" to Political Society. Fourth Edition. Crown ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... was talking at the same time. "This sapience question is just as important in my field as yours, Ruth. Sapience is the result of evolution by natural selection, just as much as a physical characteristic, and it's the most important step in the evolution of any species, our ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... upon the earth once, who knew the future better than the past, but that they died in a twelvemonth from the misery which their knowledge caused them; and if any were to be born too prescient now, he would be culled out by natural selection, before he had time to transmit so peace-destroying a faculty to ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... insure the perpetuity of its race, while the unpropitious variations disappear because they entail the destruction of the races in which they are produced. He tells us: "This preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection."[114] What does the author understand by law? He answers: "the series of facts as it is known to us."[115] Here we have the true definition of law: it is the simple expression of the series of the facts; the cause remains ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... of Washington's administration, Madison's congressional service ended. The leadership of the opposition, whatever may be thought of its influence upon the welfare of the country, or of the personal motives by which he may have been governed, had devolved upon him, almost from the beginning, by natural selection of the fittest for that position. It was not an easy place to take, either by one's own choice or by the suffrages of others; for at the head of the administration to be opposed stood the man most revered by a grateful country, ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... rider into an existing past or future. We accept the machine as a literary device to give an air of probability to the essential thing, the experience; and forget the means in the effect. The criterion of the prophecy in this case is influenced by the theory of "natural selection." Mr Wells' vision of the "Sunset of Mankind" was of men so nearly adapted to their environment that the need for struggle, with its corollary of the extermination of the unfit, had practically ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... and Wasps,' with a few minor details relating to Ants, by Sir John Lubbock, in the International Scientific Series. She was not, indeed quite so timid about her reputation as the ant, and even volunteered to give her visitor an account of the formation of hexagonal cells by Natural Selection, culled from the pages of the 'Origin of Species'; but she observed that, though her brain might be smaller in proportion than the brains of some inferior insects, it was of finer quality, what there was of it, and that fairies were merely an outgrowth of the anthropomorphic tendency ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... creatures are circumscribed in their wanderings. The first large river almost inevitably bars their way, and certainly the first salt sea becomes an impassable obstacle. Better locomotion may be classed as one of the prime aims of the old natural selection; for in that primordial day the race was to the swift as surely as the battle to the strong. But man, already pre-eminent in the common domain because of other faculties, was not content with the one form of locomotion afforded by his lower limbs. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... the words of a man who was educated to a certain extent, and very well read. When we pointed out that no gift of Nature is aimless, and that the human teeth are all devouring, he answered by quoting whole chapters of Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection and Origin of Species. "It is not true," argued he, "that the first men were born with canine teeth. It was only in course of time, with the degradation of humanity,—only when the appetite for flesh food began ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... the importance which is given to such an accident in female offspring, marriageable men, or what the new English calls "intending bridegrooms," should look at themselves dispassionately in the glass, since their natural selection of a mate prettier than themselves is not certain to bar the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... especially a house-human thinks of bugs, she thinks unpleasantly and in superlatives. And it chances that evolution, or natural selection, or life's mechanism, or fate or a creator, has wrought them into form and function also in superlatives. Cicadas are supreme in longevity and noise. One of our northern species sucks in silent ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... middle-aged, or advanced in years. They were generally large men, with finely developed brows—natural selection had brought the great heads to the top of affairs. Some were cleancut in feature, looking merely like successful business men; others, like the Prince, showed signs of sensuality and dissipation, in the baggy, haggard features. They were unquestionably an able assembly. There ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... are never tired of writing about mimicry. They assert that when organisms belonging to different families bear a close external resemblance, this resemblance has been brought about by natural selection. Having made this assertion, they expend reams of paper in demonstrating how one or both of the species benefits ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... benefits the health. Sets a man up. Look at old Peter's legs, He's a disgrace to the nation, a disgrace! Nobody shoots him, either. So he spoils Everything; for you know, you must admit, Subka, that war means natural selection, Survival of the fittest, don't you see? For instance, I survive, and you survive; Don't we? So Peter shouldn't spoil it all. They say that all the tall young men in France Were killed in the Napoleonic wars, So that most Frenchmen ...
— Rada - A Drama of War in One Act • Alfred Noyes
... waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecular movements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. This last stage having been reached, either by man's contrivance or as an unforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection must drive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before have begun to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy characters in fable who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being obliged to supply them with work, found too ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... be readily admitted that of all living writers Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace is the one the peculiar turn of whose mind best fits him to write on the subject of natural selection, or the accumulation of fortunate but accidental variations through descent and the struggle for existence. His mind in all its more essential characteristics closely resembles that of the late Mr. Charles Darwin himself, and it is no doubt due to this fact that he and Mr. Darwin elaborated their ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... biology a great gain, both from the point of view of scientific knowledge and from that of philosophical theory. Every great law that is added to our store adds also to our conviction that the universe is run through with Mind. Even so-called Chance, which used to be the "bogie" behind Natural Selection, has now been found to illustrate—in the law of Probabilities—the absence of Chance. As Professor Pearson has said: "We recognise that our conception of Chance is now utterly different from that of yore.... What we are to understand by a chance distribution is one in accordance ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... evolution; it is, however, a successful attempt to explain the law or manner of evolution. The law of natural selection, pointed out by Darwin, is called by Herbert Spencer, The struggle for existence. Darwin discovered that natural selection produces fitness between organisms and their circumstances, which explains the law of the survival ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... of the birds in this respect may be found in the Darwinian theory of natural selection. From the first settlement of the country a few of the common birds, attracted by a more suitable or more abundant food-supply, or other conditions, must inevitably have nested near human dwellings. These birds would thrive better and succeed in bringing off more young than those ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... pinch closer than the common, they cry, "Catch me here again!" and sure enough you catch them there again—perhaps before the week is out. It is as old as "Robinson Crusoe"; as old as man. Our race has not been strained for all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural Selection, to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety; the voices of its fathers call it forth. Already in our society as it exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... woman if she had concentrated by absent treatment on my lofty, self-sacrificing character, evidenced by my pursuit of the chaste in art and the sane in philosophy. But all hope had then well-nigh departed. I realized that there were inconsistencies in the theories of the survival of the fittest and natural selection. I was an example of the exception to the rule. Excluded, I became the last of my race. I was the last candy in the box—just as full of sugar as those that had been devoured, but condemned to rattle in solitude because, ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... control, forbid the teaching of certain well-established facts of genetics and heredity, because those facts do not fit the world-picture demanded by their political doctrines. And on the same sector, a religious sect recently tried, in some sections successfully, to outlaw the teaching of evolution by natural selection." ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... weigh these words, which have not been written in haste; and I entreat you also, if you wish to see how little the new theory, that species may have been gradually created by variation, natural selection, and so forth, interferes with the old theory of design, contrivance, and adaptation, nay, with the fullest admission of benevolent final causes—I entreat you, I say, to study Darwin's "Fertilisation of Orchids"—a book which (whether his main theory ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main, but ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Jacobs House dining room was crowded for the midday meal. By natural selection men fell into their places. Stewart and Jacobs, with Dr. Carey and Pryor Gaines, the young minister school teacher, had a table to themselves. The other patrons sat at the long board, while the little side table for two was filled today with Champers, the real estate man, and ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... to. Now the honourable man, the high-minded man (by which I mean myself) is too proud to ram some shimmering stuff at them just because he thinks they ought to read it. Let the boobs blunder around and grab what they can. Let natural selection operate. I think it is fascinating to watch them, to see their helpless groping, and to study the weird ways in which they make their choice. Usually they will buy a book either because they think the jacket is attractive, or because ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... said, "It was without will, purpose or desire." Have said, "All beauty, harmony and order were its results." Have also said, "It was," away back in the ages past, groaning and heaving, travailing, in great anxiety to be delivered. Speaking of it in the light of "natural selection," they have deified it, giving to it all the mental operations of an intelligent, living God. On this account some of my lovers are Pantheists. They deify nature; deify everything, and call it all God. A few ignorant Christians, on this very account, are ready to ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... development from a mollusk, should accumulate inherited knowledge till he reaches the ne plus ultra of terrestrial life, and then by a sudden break in the chain of nature lose it all, and come into the world a born fool!! This would be "development," "natural selection," and the "survival of the fittest," with a vengeance! Here is a chasm between man and the lower animals, made by the hand of God, that human wisdom ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... rhinopithecus, of which there is an expressive specimen at the South Kensington Museum. Who can consider that nose seriously and continue to believe in a recipe made up of struggle for existence, adaptation to environment, and natural selection quantum suf.? If I could dine with that monkey, ask it to drink a glass of wine with me, offer it a pinch of snuff and so on, I might come in time to feel, if not to comprehend, the import of ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... forces in motion as have destroyed the very root-ideas of orthodox righteousness in the western world. Impinging on geological discovery, it awakened almost simultaneously in the minds of Darwin and Wallace, that train of thought that found expression and demonstration at last in the theory of natural selection. As that theory has been more and more thoroughly assimilated and understood by the general mind, it has destroyed, quietly but entirely, the belief in human equality which is implicit in all the "Liberalizing" movements of the world. In the place of an essential equality, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... comfortable blasphemies, scientific or other; natural selection or the inscrutable decrees of God. Whereas this was manifestly a Hobson's selection, most unnatural and forced, to choose want of all that makes life sweet and dear; to choose gaunt babes, with pinched and livid lips—unlovely, not unloved; and these iniquitous decrees are most scrutable, ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... chiefly, perhaps, from a consciousness of good clothes. The married men stood grouped in corners and talked of their every-day affairs. The young people clustered together in little knots, governed more or less by natural selection— only the veterans of several seasons pairing off into the discreet retirement of stairs and hall angles. At the further end of the long drawing-room, Farnham's eyes at last lighted upon the object of his quest. ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... had gone before Charles Darwin and A.R. Wallace (1858) added the idea of "natural selection," or "the struggle for existence," to use the respective terms coined by each of these authors, as the chief means by which the effects of variation are accumulated and perpetuated so as to build up the modern complexities of the plant and animal ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... clever enough people; they entertained their contemporary public sufficiently, but their work had no vitality or "power of continuance." The great majority of the writings of any period are necessarily ephemeral, and time by a slow process of natural selection is constantly sifting out the few representative books which shall carry on the memory of the period to posterity. Now and then it may be predicted of some undoubted work of genius, even at the moment that it sees the light, that ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... truth of organic evolution: the labours of a lifetime of all but superhuman effort, a judicial faculty never exceeded among men, served only to confirm his confidence that all the varied forms of life upon earth have come to be what they are through an intelligible process, mainly by "natural selection." ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... Smith one day and, for the first time, there was a peevish note in his voice, "that 'natural selection' theory of yours, Ralph, seems to have worked out to some extent—but not enough. We seem to be comfortably divided, all ten of us, into happy couples, but hanged if I'm ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... dispute about individual questions, though volume after volume may be written, and thousands of observations accumulated about the struggle for existence and its insignificance, about the omnipotence or powerlessness of natural selection, natural science itself is moving in a direction which, within certain limits, must find acceptance in an ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... in his mind, and he knew and intended that it should be used for pulling out corks. But nobody made our lungs with a purpose in his mind and intended that they should be used for breathing. The respiratory apparatus was adapted to its purpose by natural selection, namely, by the gradual preservation of better and better adaptations, and by the killing-off of the ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... with some slight variation, profitable to some part of their economy. Such individuals will have a better chance of surviving, and of propagating their new and slightly different structure; and the modification may be slowly increased by the accumulative action of natural selection to any profitable extent. The variety thus formed will either coexist with, or, more commonly, will exterminate its parent form. An organic being, like the woodpecker or misseltoe, may thus come to be adapted to a score of contingences—natural selection accumulating ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... size. We here see great variability in many important characters; and if any of these variations were of service to the plant, or were correlated with useful functional differences, the species is in that state in which natural selection might readily do much for ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... more or less variable. Some variations are more fortunate than others, and these variants are the ones which survive—the ones best adapted to their environment. Given this fact of the constant variation of living matter, natural selection (i.e., survival of the fittest and elimination of the unfit) is the mechanism of evolution or progress which best accounts for the observed facts. Such variation is called "chance variation," not because it takes place by "chance" in the properly accepted ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... place of things. It seems to be true, that whether applied to language or to other branches of knowledge, the Darwinian theory, unless very precisely defined, hardly escapes from being a truism. If by 'the natural selection' of words or meanings of words or by the 'persistence and survival of the fittest' the maintainer of the theory intends to affirm nothing more than this—that the word 'fittest to survive' survives, he adds ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... We were astonished at seeing a troop of goats wending their way upward, for to our eyes there seemed not even the remotest trace of vegetation upon the rocks; and indeed the poor things looked as if with them existence were truly "a struggle," out of which little could be gained by natural selection. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... in the late spring to reach the railroad in the fall. The drive is as orderly as the march of an army. By natural selection the leaders of the cattle take the head of the herd. They are especially fitted for the place. The same ones are found in the front every day, and the others fall into position, so that throughout the drive the cattle occupy the same relative ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... (and so a higher manifestation of force than in the mineral) it brings forth the intellectual life in the protoplasmic germ for the finest organism. Through the laws of inheritance, of change, of the multiplication of progressive development, of natural selection and of the persistence of the most gifted individuals, living beings are developed through all classes ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... of the impetus the former democratic government had given. That the policy of individual responsibility and judgment, which had always been the professed aim of American government in the past, had produced leadership and popular experience by the process of natural selection, and that this leadership would last only until the time that the deadening influence of ...
— Socialism and American ideals • William Starr Myers
... the ringing himself. Consequently Field, the father of the camp, made a gallant attempt at the work, only to miss the "bell" with his hammer and strike himself on the knee, after which he limped to a seat, declaring they didn't need a bell-ringing anyhow. Upon the blacksmith the duty devolved by natural selection. ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... relieved from hard work, were more abundantly and carefully fed, and used the lomi-lomi constantly. It is supposable, too, that in the wars which prevailed among the tribes the weaklings, if any such were among the chiefs, were pretty sure to be killed off; and thus a natural selection went on which weeded out the ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... an infinity of possible elements solely on the grounds of utility." Thus the cause for our horror of incest is hidden away in our subliminal consciousness; yet we cannot but think, with Westermarck, that this instinct is but the result of natural selection,[102] the utility of the factor or factors occasioning it being no longer in evidence or required. Again, at certain seasons, man is seized with waldliebe (forest-love) and longs to flee from the haunts of men, and, with gun and rod, to revert, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... within limits, inbreeding is not harmful, but becomes such if repeated often. Is it possible that the lowest savages can have perceived this and built a policy on it? Morgan[1660] thinks that it is possible. Westermarck[1661] thinks it beyond the mental power of the lowest races. He thinks that, by natural selection, those groups which practiced inbreeding for any reason died out or were displaced by those who followed the other policy. He goes on to propose a theory that persons who grew up, or who now grow up, in intimacy develop an instinctive antipathy to sex relations ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... we mean, as you know, the transmutation of species by variation and natural selection—selection accomplished mainly, if not solely, by the struggle for existence. Now this doctrine of organic development and change or metamorphic evolution, which was, with its originators, Wallace and Darwin, a purely biological doctrine, ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... have predetermined it by maintaining approximately an equal number of the sexes, and nature frowns upon promiscuity by penalizing it with sterility and neglect of the few children that are born, so that in the struggle for existence the fittest survive by a process of natural selection. A study of biology and anthropology gives added evidence that nature favors monogamy, for in the highest grade of animals below man the monogamic relation holds almost without exception, and low-grade human ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... species of animals or plants could be swept away only by some unusual catastrophe, while for the origination of new species something called an act of "special creation" was necessary; and as to the nature of such extraordinary events there was endless room for guesswork; but the discovery of natural selection was the discovery of a process, going on perpetually under our very eyes, which must inevitably of itself extinguish some species and bring new ones into being. In these and countless other ways we have learned that all ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... here, for the figures varied from extreme slenderness to waddling fatness. The most common type was that of mild obesity which men call "plumpness," a quality so prized since the world began that the women of all races by natural selection become ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... thought, will or desire which moulds the inner nature has the power of selecting or attracting such conditions or environments as will help it in its way of manifestation. This process corresponds in some respects to the law of "natural selection." ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... containing Hutton's paper contained also his epoch-making paper on geology finds curiously a duplication in the fact that Wells's volume contained also his essay on Albinism, in which the doctrine of natural selection was for the first time formulated, as Charles Darwin freely admitted after his own efforts had made the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... much the battle cry of the prevailing philosophy as the contrary has now become the battle cry of the Darwinians, who seek to explain species, kinds, i.e. the Logoi, the divine ideas, as the products not of the originating Mind, but of natural selection, of environment or circumstance, of the survival of the fittest. And what is the fittest, if not the rational, the Platonic "Good," that is, the Logos? Why, then, turn back to the stone age of human thinking, why again ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... great naturalist. Anybody who has read it is not likely to have forgotten it. It is a kind of natural history 'Robinson Crusoe.' It was during that famous voyage that Darwin made the observations and laid the foundation for his famous theory of Natural Selection. The present edition is by far the best and most attractive hitherto published. The illustrations are artistic in the highest degree, as everybody will understand when he knows they are by the artist of Lady Brassey's 'Sunbeam.' Most of them are from sketches made on the spot by Mr. Pritchett, ...
— Mr. Murray's List of New and Recent Publications July, 1890 • John Murray
... its requirements impose from without? An art, like everything vital, takes shape not merely by pressure from without, but much more by the necessities inherent in its own constitution, the almost mechanical necessities by which all variable things can vary only in certain fashions. All the natural selection, all the outer pressure in the world, cannot make a stone become larger by cutting, cannot make colour less complex by mixing, cannot make the ear perceive a dissonance more easily than a consonance, cannot make the ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... him different and keener perceptions, that explanation was entirely inadequate. He wanted a quality beyond his experience, beyond, he realized, any material condition—Susan Brundon, yes; but it was no comparatively simple urge of sex, the natural selection of the general animal creation. There was no question of passionate importunities; those, here, would be worse than futile; all that he desired was beyond words, moving in obedience to a principle of which he had not caught ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... P. t. erasmus has evolved from P. t. gentilis by natural selection for concealing coloration on the dark lavas northeast of Durango, Mexico. P. t. erasmus probably reaches its western limit close to ...
— A New Pinon Mouse (Peromyscus truei) from Durango, Mexico • Robert B. Finley
... that my word 'voluntary' has misled you," I put in. "It isn't the word exactly. The divisions among us are rather a process of natural selection. You will see, as you get better acquainted with the workings of our institutions, that there are no arbitrary distinctions here but the fitness of the work for the man and the man for the work determines the social rank that ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... asylums, hospitals and houses of refuge have been its excuse for existence, and the undoing of the infidel. But service with the Catholic Church is emphasized only for the priesthood—the laity being simply asked to define, submit and pay. Culture and character are left to natural selection, and the thought that any person but a priest could have either is a very modern hypothesis. In way of Religion by Definition, Saint Paul was the great modern exponent. That the Theological Quibblers' Club existed long before his time we know full well. In fact, the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... process of natural selection, would afford opportunity to the least contented, whether because of grievances, or ambitions, to establish themselves. This tended to produce a Western flavor in the towns on the frontier. But it was not until the original ideals of the land system began to change, that the opportunity ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... Dr. Wells developed a theory of evolution by natural selection to account for varieties in the human race. About 1820 Dean Herbert, eminent as an authority in horticulture, avowed his conviction that species are but fixed varieties. In 1831 Patrick Matthews stumbled upon and stated the main ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... thousand, with which they might be exposed. Thus, by degrees, this variety, with some slight organic change or modification, must spread itself over the whole surface of the habitable globe, and extirpate or replace the other kinds. That is what is meant by NATURAL SELECTION; that is the kind of argument by which it is perfectly demonstrable that the conditions of existence may play exactly the same part for natural varieties as man does for domesticated varieties. No one doubts at all that particular circumstances may be more favourable ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... Geoffrey. And the two pairs of lovers, Mr. CYRIL RAYMOND and Miss MAUD BELL above stairs, and Mr. REGINALD BACH and Miss DORIS LYTTON below (they were really all of them on the ground floor, the butler's room being the common trysting-place), served as delightful examples of natural selection—both on their own part and that of the management—and were as fresh and healthy as the most ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... some of our minor poets tried to set Science to music, to write sonnets on the survival of the fittest and odes to Natural Selection. Socialism, and the sympathy with those who are unfit, seem, if we may judge from Miss Nesbit's remarkable volume, to be the new theme of song, the fresh subject-matter for poetry. The change has some advantages. Scientific laws are at once too abstract and too clearly defined, and even the visible ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... microscope when applied to the developmental processes of certain simple animal and vegetable forms. The doctrine that the individual body was evolved by the forces of life, acted on and directed by natural selection, as guardian and transmitter of the germ-plasm, assumes a less paradoxical character when we perceive with what unfailing art Nature has constructed and devised the body and the mind for their function. We flatter ourselves hugely if we suppose ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... you compare your width and height— Arms horizontal, left and right— With ancient types of pure perfection, The ratio may not, it's true, Be as the root of 5 to 2, But what, my dear, has that to do With laws of natural selection? ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CLVIII, January 7, 1920 • Various
... not doubted that the gradual evolution of our actual moral ideas—our actual ideas about what is right or wrong in particular cases—has been largely influenced by education, environment, association, social pressure, superstition, perhaps natural selection—in short, all the agencies by which naturalistic Moralists try to account for the existence of Morality. Even Euclid, or whatever his modern substitute may be, has to be taught; but that does not show that Geometry is an arbitrary system {65} invented by the ingenious ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... it is Nature. Science condescends to speak of natural selection. Look at these! They are both graceful and winning and witty, bright to mind and eye, made for one another, as country people say. I can't blame him. Besides, we don't know that he's guilty. We're quite in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... had hitherto lain in that cheerful chaos of general knowledge which has been called general ignorance. The excitement was immense. Evolution, development, heredity, adaptation, variety, survival, natural selection, were so many patent pass-keys that were ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley
... authors—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb—who believed themselves to be the discoverers of fresh truth unknown to their generation. The contemporary and independent discovery by Wallace and Darwin of the principle of natural selection furnishes, perhaps, a rough parallel, but the fact serves to show how impalpable and universal is the spread of ideas, how impossible it is to settle literary indebtedness or construct literary genealogy with any hope of accuracy. Blake, by ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... must sit down." I observed on this and other occasions that Russian gypsies are very naif. And as it is in human nature to prefer sitting by a pretty girl, these Slavonian Romanys so arrange it according to the principles of natural selection—or natural politeness—that, when a stranger is in their gates, the two prettiest girls in their possession sit at his right and left, the two less attractive next again, et seriatim. So at once a ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... gratify its own social needs to the utmost are altogether independent of the race, and would not cease to exist even in a community vowed to celibacy or the most absolute Neo-Malthusianism. Nor, again, must it be said that social reform destroys the beneficial results of natural selection. ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Bach forgot—but he is not eclectic, they say. Brahms shows many things that Bach did remember, so he is an eclectic, they say. Leoncavallo writes pretty verses and Palestrina is a priest, and Confucius inspires Scriabin. A choice is freedom. Natural selection is but one of Nature's tunes. "All melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads, when once the penetrating keynote of nature and spirit is sounded—the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart-beat, which make the tune to which the sun rolls, and the globule of blood ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, is one of the processes by which evolution takes place. According to this law, only the fittest survive in the struggle for life. Darwin was led to this discovery on reading Malthus's thesis regarding ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... against a barbarous pseudo-evangelical teleology intolerably obstructive to all scientific progress, but was accompanied, as it happened, by discoveries of extraordinary interest in physics, chemistry, and that lifeless method of evolution which its investigators called Natural Selection. Howbeit, there was only one result possible in the ethical sphere, and that was the banishment of conscience from human affairs, or, as Samuel Butler vehemently put it, "of ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... believer in the Bible and Christianity, I don't need these things as confirmations, and they are not likely to be a religion to me. I regard them simply as I do the phenomena of the Aurora Borealis, or Darwin's studies on natural selection, as curious studies into nature. Besides, I think some day we shall find a law by which all these facts will fall ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... those who have read nothing about Natural Selection, if I here give a brief sketch of the whole subject and of its bearing on the origin of species. (Introduction/1. To any one who has attentively read my 'Origin of Species' this Introduction will be superfluous. ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... attempting to deal, even in outline, with the vast subject of evolution in general, an endeavour has been made to give such an account of the theory of Natural Selection as may enable any intelligent reader to obtain a clear conception of Darwin's work, and to understand something of the power and ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... be evident that Heredity, Natural Selection, Evolution, Environment, etc., are things which, at the very best, can be allowed an exceedingly small part in artistic re-creation. Not only do they come under the general ban of Purpose, but their ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... individuals are endowed by nature with temperaments which make them take naturally to a social life and shine there. In it they find their natural element. They develop freely just where others shrivel up and disappear. There is continually going on unseen a "natural selection," the discarding of unfit material, the assimilation of new and congenial elements from outside, with the logical result of a survival of the fittest. Aside from this, you will find in "the world," as anywhere else, that the person who succeeds is generally he ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... sports occur without our discerning the cause and without [435] any relation to adaptation. This however is partly due to our lack of knowledge, and partly to the general rule that in nature only such sports as are useful are spared by natural selection, and what is ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... in elaborating his theory of Natural Selection he attributed too little to external ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... humanity up into small cliques, and effectively limit the selection of the individual to his own clique, is to postpone the Superman for eons, if not for ever. Not only should every person be nourished and trained as a possible parent, but there should be no possibility of such an obstacle to natural selection as the objection of a countess to a navvy or of a duke to a charwoman. Equality is essential to good breeding; and equality, as all economists ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (p. 167), A. R. Wallace has recorded cases of simultaneous variation among insects, apparently due to climate or other strictly local causes. He found that the butterflies of the family Papilionidae, and some others, became similarly modified in ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... alone knows the number for whom is reserved eternal happiness,' as the prayer for the living and the dead expresses it."(592) Whether God will round out the number of the elect by suddenly precipitating the end of the world or by a sort of "natural selection," is an open question. To assume the latter could hardly be reconciled with the dogma of the universality of His saving will. St. Augustine seems to favor ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... his rifle reversed, and the hoary game of natural selection was played out with all the ruthlessness of its primeval environment. Rifle and ax went up and down, hit or missed with monotonous regularity; lithe bodies flashed, with wild eyes and dripping fangs; and man and beast fought for supremacy to the bitterest conclusion. Then the beaten brutes crept ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... disaster. In the case of human beings, it is their thoughts that identify them as life form or disaster. Mountain or volcano. In the city everyone radiates suspicion and death. They enjoy killing, thinking about killing, and planning for killing. This is natural selection, too, you realize. These are the survival traits that work best in the city. Outside the city men think differently. If they are threatened individually, they fight, as will any other creature. Under more general survival threats they co-operate completely with the rules for universal ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... found to-day? Nowhere. Promiscuous breeding has produced a weakness of character that is too timid to face the full stringency of a thoroughly competitive struggle for existence and too lazy and petty to organize the commonwealth co-operatively. Being cowards, we defeat natural selection under cover of philanthropy: being sluggards, we neglect artificial selection under cover of ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... longest. During ages of the world's history, while animal life was slowly evolving, the female was the larger, stronger and more representative creature; the male was small, often a parasite, told off for the sole purpose of reproduction. By natural selection, the female choosing always the best male, the male was gradually developed until he became bigger and stronger than the female. For a time natural selection continued to work, the males competing for the favor of the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... at work here, as everywhere. There is a struggle for existence among religions, as among all other forms of life. The law of variation has had full play in all this realm; human nature has produced a great variety of religious ideas and forms, and natural selection is doing its work upon them. The fittest will survive. And the fittest religion will be the religion that ministers most perfectly to human needs; that makes the best and strongest men and women; that rears up the most fruitful and the ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... Vorhies found all mounds within 4 or 5 miles of Albuquerque, N. Mex., deserted by spectabilis, resulting probably from overgrazing by sheep and goats during a succession of dry years. In the arid Southwest natural selection probably favors the animals with the largest food stores, and it is not surprising that the storing habit has been developed ...
— Life History of the Kangaroo Rat • Charles T. Vorhies and Walter P. Taylor
... imagine to be reassuring to the nervous animal is precisely the cause of his terror. It is a useful adaptation to the ways of the great enemy Man, whether it is an adaptation resulting from individual experience or acquired by natural selection. From the stand-point of wild animality it is the Silence of ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... natural selection? How does it lead to change in animals? Does natural selection still operate among human beings? (See ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... Maurier's life we find the testimony to his sweetness of disposition. He had the great loyalty to friends which is really loyalty to the world at large, made up of possible friends. Friends are not an accident, but they are made by a process of natural selection, which, if we are wise and generous, we do not ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... It explains to us the vital importance of their constant reciprocal action in the production of organic forms. Darwin was the first to teach us the great part that was played in this by the ceaseless struggle for existence between living things, and to show how, under the influence of this (by natural selection), new species were produced and maintained solely by the interaction of heredity and adaptation. It was thus Darwinism that first opened our eyes to a true comprehension of the supremely important relations between the two parts of the science of organic evolution—Ontogeny ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... the better-off child is kept indoors and becomes flabby and less resistant to minor ailments. The statistics of infantile mortality suggest that the children of the poorer schools have also gone through a more severe selection; disease weeding out by natural selection, and the less fit having succumbed before school age, the residue are of sturdier type than in schools or classes where such ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... light in weight; one will be struck by the whiteness of a hand, another by the smoothness of its skin. For one child the window will be a rectangle; to another it is something through which the blue of the sky may be seen. The choice of prevailing characteristics made by children becomes a "natural selection" harmonizing with their ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... deliberate form here, any more than there is in the forces of nature. Shall we say, then, that nothing but the void exists? The void is filled by a Presence. There is a controlling, directing, overarching will in every page, every verse, that there is no escape from. Design and purpose, natural selection, growth, culmination, are just as pronounced as in ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... unprecedented power and so far dominate everything else in his activities as a living organism, that they have to a very large extent, if not entirely, cut him off from the general operation of that process of Natural Selection and survival of the fittest which up to their appearance had been the law of the living world. They justify the view that Man forms a new departure in the gradual unfolding of Nature's predestined scheme. Knowledge, reason, self-consciousness, will, are ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... would appear to be to effect any rapprochement of the English and Irish national points of view, these having been determined by the different environments of the two races. In national life as in nature the law of natural selection operates. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... entered the present conflict—that war is a biological necessity. War, we are told, is a manifestation of the "Struggle for Life"; it is the inevitable application to mankind of the Darwinian "law" of natural selection. There are, however, two capital and final objections to this view. On the one hand it is not supported by anything that Darwin himself said, and on the other hand it is denied as a fact by those authorities on natural history who speak with most knowledge. That Darwin regarded war as an insignificant ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... displease Georgiana as a feature of our courtship. Nature is very stringent here, very guarded, truly universal. Invariably the young men of my day grow lavish in the use of unguents when they are preparing for natural selection; and I flatter myself that even my own garments—in their superficial aspects at least, and during my long pursuit of Georgiana—have not been very ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... to stand. In its inception his theory is half-miracle and half-fact. He assumes that in the beginning (as if there ever was or could be a "beginning," in that sense) God created a few forms, animal and vegetable, and then left it to the gods of Evolution, the chief of which is Natural Selection, to do the rest. While Darwin would not admit any predetermining factors in Evolution, or that any innate tendency to progressive development existed, he said he could not look upon the world of living things as the result of chance. Yet in fortuitous, or chance, variation he ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... came, of all who were conscious of the deeper needs of the Church. What intelligent acquaintance with Darwin's speculations would the world in general have made, except for two or three happy and comprehensive terms, as 'the survival of the fittest,' 'the struggle for existence,' 'the process of natural selection'? Multitudes who else would have known nothing about Comte's system, know something about it when they know that he called ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... succeeding paragraph, Lyell very remarkably foreshadows Darwin's "natural selection" and "struggle for existence." He speaks of a species being rendered more prolific in order to perpetuate its existence; "but this would perhaps make it press too hard upon other species at other times. Now if it be an insect it may ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... just in proportion as they are really alive (for in most real things there is presumably some defect of rhythm tending to stoppage of life), there is bound to be this organic interdependence and interchange. Natural selection, the survival of such individuals and species as best work in with, are most rhythmical to, their surroundings—natural ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... effect of expectation is perfectly obvious; 'natural selection,' in fact, was bound to bring it about sooner or later. It is of the utmost practical importance to an animal that he should have prevision of the qualities of the objects {79} that surround him, and especially that he should not come to rest in presence of circumstances that might be fraught ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... political organism. The true polity is only in slow formation; for, obviously, human reason is not yet a complete development. As yet, men come to the front by accident; some day they will be advanced to power by an inevitable and impeccable process of natural selection. For my own part"—he turned slightly towards the hostess—"I think that use will be made of our existing system of aristocracy; in not a few instances, technical aristocracy is justified by natural pre-eminence. We can all think of examples. Personally, I might mention my friend ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing |
