Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin, FRS FRGS FLS FZSwas an English naturalist and geologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in...
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth12 February 1809
CityShrewsbury, England
When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.
Natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight successive favorable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short steps.
As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.
I think it can be shown that there is such an unerring power at work in Natural Selection, which selects exclusively for the good of each organic being.
The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
Sympathy will have been increased through natural selection
Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.
I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.
In however complex a manner this feeling may have originated, as it is one of high importance to all those animals which aid and defend one another, it will have been increased through natural selection; for those communities, which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members, would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.
...I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work; and I still think there is an eminently important difference.
Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such fine graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.
Here, both in space and time, we seem to be brought somewhat nearer to the great fact -- the mysteries of mysteries -- the fist appearance of new beings on earth,
There is something referred to as the 'Darwin industry' in science.
The belief in God has often been advanced as not only the greatest but the most complete of all the distinctions between man and the lower animals. It is, however, impossible to maintain that this belief is instinctive in man. The idea of a universal and beneficent creator does not seem to arise in the mind of man until he has been elevated by long, continued culture.