"Natural selection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... belonging to what are called the same genera are 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 not exclusive ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... same yesterday, to-day, and forever, and in whose sight a thousand years are but as yesterday, knows no such "law of variability" as our materialistic friends have been spinning for us in their unverified theories of evolution, natural selection, selection of the fittest, rejection of the unfit—force-correlations, molecular machinery, transmutation of physical forces, differentiation, dynamical aggregates, molA(C)cules organiques, potentiated sky-mist, undifferentiated "life-stuff," and ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... 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 ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... 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 most ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... 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 infinite ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... nationalities. The old men said the marriage system had given them more trouble than anything else, and they finally abandoned all laws to the laws of nature. The young people were allowed to mate by natural selection, and if they were ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston
... 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
... we are still close to savagery, and it is inevitable that the ideas and customs and sentiments of savagery should have become so ingrained that they may have actually affected man's nature by natural selection through the survival of those who most completely adjusted themselves to the uncritical culture which prevailed. But in any case it is certain, as many anthropologists have pointed out, that customs, savage ideas, and ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... 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 ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... sexual intercourse underwent a change as soon as here and there individuals appeared who were conscious of their individuality. Natural selection could not come into play in a community the members of which resembled one another so closely that all personal characteristics were obliterated in a general monotony. One woman was as good as another, although ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... the savage from the beast. So we are accustomed to argue, but we must make a singular reservation. The lowest peoples of the human family, which seem to represent primitive man, do not wage war, and are little addicted to violence. They seem by some process of natural selection to have obtained the social quality of peacefulness and mutual aid. There was, in a sense, a stage of primitive innocence. As, however, these primitive peoples grew in numbers and were organised in tribes, as they obtained ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... sobbed. "And if ever I get that girl inside a net she'll learn something about natural selection that they p-p-probably forgot to teach in their ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... to 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 be true or not) will still remain a most valuable ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... by that balance of conditions and forces we call "natural selection." As the environment changes they must be adapted to it, if they cannot so adapt themselves they die. Those who live are, by living, proven capable of maintaining themselves. Every creature which has remained on earth, while so many less effective kinds died out, remains as a conqueror. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... taken in some 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, often out of reach of any vicissitude ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... up one point of a great deal of consequence. In any locality plant the species which belong to that locality. The species which, by natural selection and adaptation have fitted themselves to the environment are, as a rule, the trees which will do best in that locality. That is a principle I think which ought to be thoroughly well fixed in mind. One may experiment with any number of trees from a distance, but the trees which naturally ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... polities were began, there is no difficulty in explaining why they lasted. Whatever may be said against the principle of 'natural selection' in other departments, there is no doubt of its predominance in early human history. The strongest killed out the weakest, as they could. And I need not pause to prove that any form of politics more efficient ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... 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
... By natural selection, Miss Dix was appointed Superintendent of Women Nurses in the federal service, by order of the Secretary of War. In this capacity she served through the four years' struggle. In a letter dated December 7, 1864, she writes: "I take no hour's leisure. I think that since the war, ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... new demand. The 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 this one, young or old, man or woman, full ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... of man in society, just like the life of other species, is a struggle for existence, and therefore it is a process of selective adaptation. The evolution of social structure has been a process of natural selection of institutions. The progress which has been and is being made in human institutions and in human character may be set down, broadly, to a natural selection of the fittest habits of thought and to a process of enforced adaptation of individuals to an environment which has progressively ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... recall that he had ever seen a single one of them stirred to utterance by any impersonal question of injustice. To be sure there were charitable ones among them, he supposed, but he had always tended by a kind of natural selection toward the conspicuously fair, and the conspicuously fair had proved invariably to be the secretly selfish as well. His social life appeared to him now, as he walked by Laura's side, to have been devoid of sincerity as of intelligence, ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... forty-nine 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... since, she took with her all but a handful of her colonists working the vast gold mines of Central Africa. From these and their degraded slaves and a later intermixture of the blood of the anthropoids sprung the gnarled men of Opar; but by some queer freak of fate, aided by natural selection, the old Atlantean strain had remained pure and undegraded in the females descended from a single princess of the royal house of Atlantis who had been in Opar at the time of the great catastrophe. ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... eye; that most flowers which secrete nectar have what he termed "honey guides"—spots of bright color, heavy veining, or some such pathfinder on the petals—in spite of the most patient and scientific research that shed great light on natural selection a half-century before Darwin advanced the theory, he left it for the author of "The Origin of Species" to show that cross-fertilization—the transfer of pollen from one blossom to another, not from anthers to stigma of the ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... Riebeek 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 ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, and Virginia, may even have proved the deciding factor in turning the tide of events. The nation's leader for the struggle seems to have been secured through a process of natural selection as had been the case a century earlier with Washington. We may recall that Washington died but ten years before Lincoln was born; and from the fact that each leader was at hand when the demand came for his service, ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... considerable progressive variation from the normal. Indeed it was from this premise that he developed the celebrated "variation" theory which is, now, generally admitted to have compromised the whole principle of "Natural Selection" while it has given a wonderful impetus to all recent investigations and experiments on the lines first ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... The physical speculators begin with a possible hypothesis, in which they aim at explanation: and so the bold aspirations of the author of the Vestiges find standing-ground in the variation of species by "natural selection." Some relics—so supposed—of extremely ancient men are brought to help the general cause. Only distant hints are given that by possibility it may end in the formation of all living organisms from a very few, if not from one. The better heads above mentioned know that their theory, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... themselves. Your social orders seem able to resist Darwin's theory, but in a republic natural selection has a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... 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 ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... 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 races ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... the choice (for perpetuation by reproduction) from a mixed population, of the individuals possessing in common a certain character or a certain degree of some character. Two kinds of selection may be distinguished: (1) natural selection, in which choice is made automatically by the failure to reproduce (through death or some other cause) of the individuals who are not "fit" to pass the tests of the environment (vitality, disease resistance, speed, success in mating, or what not); and (2) artificial ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... suggestively with the difficulties of natural selection ... and their arguments are supported by a ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... 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 ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... Herbert's: he explains it all on biological grounds as the beautiful discriminative action of natural selection. Simple, but not consolatory. Still, look at the other side of the question. Suppose you and everybody else were to give up all superfluities, and confine all your energies to the unlimited production of bare necessaries. Suppose you occupy every ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... folly; I detest still more (if I must be frank, dear Arthur) mere cleverness. Mankind has simply become a tailless host of uninstinctive animals. We should never have taken to Evolution, Mr. Withers. 'Natural Selection!'—little gods and fishes!—the deaf for the dumb. We should have used our brains—intellectual pride, the ecclesiastics call it. And by brains I mean—what do I mean, Alice?—I mean, my dear child," and ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... Causes become effects; effects develop into causes. The red-haired girl's dire need of courage and cunning has augmented her store of those qualities by the law of natural selection. She is, by long odds, the most intelligent and bemusing of women. She shows cunning, foresight, technique, variety. She always fails a dozen times before she succeeds; but she brings to the final business the abominable expertness ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... in elaborating his theory of Natural Selection he attributed too little to external surroundings. ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... science lead us to look upon the absence of the mother from the home as the cause of the gravest possible evils, can we be warranted in standing passively by, allowing this evil to work itself out to the bitter end, by the process of natural selection? Something might perhaps be said in favor of the present apathetic mode of viewing this question, if natural selection were really securing the survival of the fittest, so that only the weakly babes were killed ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... sometimes exercised for the preservation of the individual, sometimes for the perpetuation of the race. We must expect to find acts of the last kind more instinctive and less reflective than those of the first, and this agrees well with what we know of natural selection. If we now see living beings display so many resources and calculate with such certainty all that will favour the healthy development of their descendants, we must not necessarily conclude that the species possess these instincts from the beginning. They are not to be regarded as mechanisms ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... the struggle for the mastery inevitably resulted, by a kind of natural selection, in the growing predominance of the people of the British Islands, in whom commercial enterprise and political instinct were blended so happily. The very lawlessness of the period favored the extension of their ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... 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, ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... suppose for a moment, Josephine, that this were true. Surely you would be happy in a marriage so fortified by natural selection, and, as for Charles—the loss of certain things might ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... its descendants and 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 to be sought for. I open the ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... 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 to develop—that the jaws ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... very lord of creation, for instead of remaining, like the animals, entirely subject to his surroundings he subjected his surroundings to himself. By means of this intelligence man was enabled to break away from the absolute rule of the law of natural selection which punishes with extinction all those types that fail in fitness for survival in the struggle for existence, so that, unlike the animals that die out when their particular structure does not fit in with their environment, man by means of his ...
— The Black Man's Place in South Africa • Peter Nielsen
... The place reached does not give the form of the road that leads there; while an organic structure is just the accumulation of those small differences which evolution has had to go through in order to achieve it. The struggle for life and natural selection can be of no use to us in solving this part of the problem, for we are not concerned here with what has perished, we have to do only with what has survived. Now, we see that identical structures have ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... make the admission that, however much people may 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 ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... prate 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 ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... on the systematic and anatomical side of Biology, the idea of Evolution, and especially of Darwin's theory of Natural Selection, had important consequences on that side of the science which may be described as Natural History. Before the appearance of Darwin's work, Natural History consisted chiefly in the observation and collection of facts about the habits and ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... 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 bad ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... an [apparent] end." If the reader will take the trouble to compare this quotation just made from Mill, and the long train of reasoning that follows, with an admirable illustration in Mr. Wallace's "Natural Selection," he will be well rewarded by finding all the steps in Mr. Mill's reasoning so closely paralleled by the caricature, that but for the respective dates of publication, one might have thought the latter had an express reference to the former.[18] True, Mr. ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... 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
... of men tried 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 ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... before scientific societies during the last fifteen years, with others now printed for the first time. The two first of the series are printed without alteration, because, having gained me the reputation of being an independent originator of the theory of "natural selection," they may be considered to have some historical value. I have added to them one or two very short explanatory notes, and have given headings to subjects, to make them uniform with the rest of the book. The other essays have been carefully corrected, often considerably enlarged, ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... painting, might have merely physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection might have secured the survival of those automata which made useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct of self-preservation would have been developed, dangers would have been shunned without being feared, and injuries ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... to marry a dynamo to bring out her best it was Ruth Temple. And she married Bernard Graves—a man who has degenerated into a poseur before women's clubs. Marriages made in heaven indeed! Give me Darwin and natural selection." ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... 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
... individuation and genesis established in each case? All specialties of the reproductive process are due to the natural selection of favourable variations. Given a certain surplus available for race preservation, and it is clear that by indirect equilibration only can there be established that peculiar distribution of this surplus which is seen in ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."—HERBERT SPENCER: Principles of Biology. ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... we see their children, now grown, finding themselves, with Natural Selection. The man in the center, splendid in physical and intellectual perfection, attracts the women on either hand, while two other men, deserted for this finer type, display anger and despair. One tries to hold the woman by force, the other, unable to ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... man or woman. As surely as reproduction is woman's peculiar function, and nutrition man's, just so surely does marriage sum up more to woman than to man. It becomes the whole life of the woman, while to the man it is rather an episode, rather a mere side to his many-sided life. Natural selection has made it so. The countless men of the past, even from before the time they swung down out of the trees, who devoted more time and energy to their love-affairs than to the winning of food and shelter, died from innutrition in various ways. Only the men, normal men, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... 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 ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... must have space and dignity, Stephen—and those women had things in their hands as no women have things in their hands to-day. They came to the House of Lords. But they lost all that. Was there some sort of natural selection?... ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... animals was Buffon, about 1750, and other writers followed out the idea. The eccentric Lord Monboddo was the first to suggest the possible descent of man from the ape, about 1774. In 1813 Dr. W. C. Wells first proposed to apply the principle of natural selection to the natural history of man, and in 1822 Professor Herbert first asserted the probable transmutation of species of plants. In 1844 a book appeared called "Vestiges of Creation," which, though evidently ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... subjects. This he does with his usual fulness, candor, and impartiality; and the reader at the same time gathers from him that he is strongly inclined to accept the doctrine of the origin of species by 'variation and natural selection,' and to accord vast periods of time for the workings of that law of development and transmutation which he believes to pervade all mundane affairs. Considerable space is devoted to the consideration of man's place in nature, and especially to ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... produced the man, so should we ultimately produce something higher than the man. The immediate answer, of course, is sufficiently obvious: the ape did not worry about the man, so why should we worry about the Superman? If the Superman will come by natural selection, may we leave it to natural selection? If the Superman will come by human selection, what sort of Superman are we to select? If he is simply to be more just, more brave, or more merciful, then Zarathustra ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... part in Wallace's autobiography, entitled "My Life," is here published, with new additions, for the first time as a whole, so that the reader now has before him the necessary material to form a true estimate of the origin and growth of the theory of Natural Selection, and of the personal relationships ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... lots of other people, too, believe in a thing they call Natural Selection. They think, as part of that belief, that men are descended from hairy simian ancestors; assert that even a hundred thousand years ago the ancestor was hairy—hairy, heavy, and almost as much a brute as if he lived ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... is built up to eighteen hands high, with a width and weight infinitely more than proportionate to his height, if we compare him to the southern horse. In the arid south, by no contrivance of man or "natural selection" can a horse of weight be produced; though you may breed the terse horse of the south in the north by keeping him ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... phase through Charles Darwin's epochmaking work: "The Origin of Species." The keynote of Darwin's theory is Natural Selection, by which term the development of all living forms is referred to the working of certain laws which in the reproduction of plants and animals preserved those individuals which were best fitted to survive the struggle ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... it objectively," Douglas said. "We're trying to select the best physical type we can in the hope that he'll pass his qualities to his offspring, and there's no better practical way to select the strongest and hardiest than by natural selection. We control their environment as little as possible and let Nature do our educating until they're old ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... matter of fact, they are nothing more or less than the results of evolution, natural selection and the survival of the fittest. All we require for the demonstration of our theory, is a little bit of protoplasm at the beginning of things and a mass of elemental matter in an ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... Species by Means of Natural Selection: or, The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. By Charles Darwin, M. A., Fellow of the Royal Geological, Linnaean, etc., Societies; Author of "Journal of Researches during H. M. S. Beagle's Voyage round the World." New York. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... means worse and worse! Now, I am in the process of reformation. The natural selection, however, where honesty is in the series, is a slow proceeding, and the organic changes are very complicated. As I know, however, you attach value to the effect you produce in that coat, I'll go and recover it. I shall not need Terence or Juvenal ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... between the two. For all their sakes I must give here a little history of the conflict between the view of Evolution taken by the Darwinians (though not altogether by Darwin himself) and called Natural Selection, and that which is emerging, under the title of Creative Evolution, as the genuinely scientific religion for which all wise men are now ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... moment, or that has been before me only a very little while before; I must allow my recollections to get thoroughly strained free from all chaff till nothing be except the pure gold; allow my memory to choose out what is truly memorable by a process of natural selection; and I piously believe that in this way I ensure the Survival of the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or if I am obliged to write letters during the course of my little excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never again find out what is worthy of being preserved, or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... established companies, since their superintendents and assistants have grown up with the business, and have been gradually worked into and fitted for their especial duties through years of training and the process of natural selection. Even in these establishments, however, this difficulty has impressed itself upon the managers so forcibly that most of them have of late years spent thousands of dollars in re-grouping their machine tools for the purpose of making their foremanship ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... 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 ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... Intolerable Burden Mobilization Children's Rights and Parents' Wrongs How Little We Know About Our Parents Our Abandoned Mothers Family Affection The Fate of the Family Family Mourning Art Teaching The Impossibility of Secular Education Natural Selection as a Religion Moral Instruction Leagues The Bible Artist Idolatry "The Machine" The Provocation to Anarchism ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... infinite toil, was that the method in which this continuity of descent proceeded was by an infinitely slow process of very small changes differentiating each minute step from the one before and the one after it, and these small changes Darwin's hypothesis referred to a natural selection. Nothing else in Darwin's work, he assured me, was novel, and yet it was the one thing which subsequent research had rendered more and more doubtful. Darwin (he said) said nothing new that ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... virtually a ceremony, since the real event has been already accomplished, the guest having stolen in by some other way and made himself at home in the sub-conscious mind. Insensibly and inevitably I had become an evolutionist, albeit never wholly satisfied with natural selection as the only and sufficient explanation of the change in the forms of life. And again, insensibly and inevitably, the new doctrine has led to modifications of the old religious ideas and eventually to a ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... most important theses advanced in Romantic Love and Personal Beauty (323, 424, etc.), was that love, far from being merely a passing episode in human life, is one of the most powerful agencies working for the improvement of the human race. During the reign of Natural Selection, before the birth of love, cripples, the insane, the incurably diseased, were cruelly neglected and allowed to perish. Christianity rose up against this cruelty, building hospitals and saving the infirm, who were thus enabled ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... his 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 ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... whole family of cognate geniuses, grouped together, conscious of affinity, obeying the same general conditions, but issuing in markedly divergent characteristics. Democracies, oligarchies, aristocracies spring into being by laws of natural selection within the limits of a single province. Every municipality has a separate nomenclature for its magistracies, a somewhat different method of distributing administrative functions. In one place there is a Doge appointed for life; in another the government is put into commission among officers ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... spinsters, and 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. Alice sat in the midst of a group of young girls who had intrenched ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... are such voters to be 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 ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... and Politics; or, Thoughts on the Application of the Principles of "Natural Selection" and "Inheritance" to Political Society. By Walter Bagehot. ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... many of the phenomena of evolution which seemed clearly explicable to the learned master of science who founded these lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfactorily explained. The scientific men of most note now differ widely in their estimates of the relative parts played in evolution by natural selection, by mutation, by the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study their writings with a growing impression that there are forces at work which our blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the case the part of wisdom is to say that we believe ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... about by formal introduction, because neither party has been previously led to expect anything of the other. There is no surer way of making friendship impossible than telling two people that they are sure to be such good friends, and are just suited to each other. The law of natural selection applies to almost everything we want in the world, from food and climate to ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... 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 disproportion between the rates of increase ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... would, in fact, commit "the happy despatch," a la Japonaise. All this may be true, but I hold that language is meant to be an instrument of communication, and that in the struggle for life, the most efficient instrument of communication must certainly carry the day, as long as natural selection, or, as we formerly called it, reason, rules ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... 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 of ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... human being, if permitted to summon spirits from the vasty deep, would base his choice upon personal qualities, and not on mere general reputation. There would be an elective affinity, a principle of natural selection, (not Darwinian,) by which each would aim to draw forth a spirit to his liking. One would not summon the author of such and such a book, but this or that man. Milton wrote an admirable epic, but he would be awful in society. Shakspeare was a splendid dramatist, but one ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... me as I ride and on every hand I see the merciless and infinite waste of natural selection. The White Logic insists upon opening the long-closed books, and by paragraph and chapter states the beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility and dust. About me is murmur and hum, and I know it for the gnat-swarm of the living, piping for a ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... theories of evolution and methods of investigation. 1 The theory of descent and of natural selection. Evolution and adaptation. Elementary species and varieties. Methods ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... incline. But we may confess to an impression, thus far, that the doctrine of the permanent and complete immutability of species has not been established, and may fairly be doubted. We believe that species vary, and that "Natural Selection" works; but we suspect that its operation, like every analogous natural operation, may be limited by something else. Just as every species by its natural rate of reproduction would soon fill any country it could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... said in recent years that Darwinism is dead, and there is a sense in which this is true. Unmodified and unassisted natural selection is not to-day considered by most scientists a sufficient agent for producing evolution. But everyone connected with the subject acknowledges Darwin as the master, and says that it was his work which converted the world to a belief in evolution. We can have no better ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... most important achievement. He detected and demonstrated the operation of a factor hitherto unsuspected. This new factor to which he drew attention as the chief agent in organic development was called by him 'natural selection,' The name has a positive sound and suggests a process of active choice. But Darwin was fully aware that the process to which he gave this name was a negative and not a positive operation; and as such it was clearly recognised by him. The name was, no doubt, chosen ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... make in that under any REGIME. The luxuries of the few are a drop in the bucket—the crowd now has all there is. The difference between private and public ownership, it seems to me, is mainly in the natural selection of those most competent to foresee the future and to direct labor into the most productive channels, and the greater poignancy of the illusion of self-seeking under which the private owner works. ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial selection, no survival of the fittest by main force—the force of the spectator, who thinks he knows better than the creator of the ugly and the beautiful, the fair and ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... why should we run only to modern authorities? All great inventions, all great ideas, have been present to men's minds and hopes from the beginning of civilization. Did not Empedocles forestall Mr. Darwin, and hit out, at a stroke, the hypothesis of natural selection?" ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... of the place which he finds in the main highly efficient, and the cruel punishment of the strappado. The garrucha or strappado and the garrotes, combined with the water-torture and the rack, represented the survival of the fittest in the natural selection of torments concerning which the Holy Office in Italy and Spain had such a vast experience. The strappado as described by Smollett, however, is a more severe form of torture even than that practised by the Inquisition, and we can ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... 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 ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... you will find in your texts, but others you will have to make for yourself. In order to get practice in this, undertake the manufacture of a few definitions, using terms such as charity, benevolence, natural selection. This exercise will reveal what an exacting mental operation definition is and will prove how vague most of ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... statesman who brought about the coalition, put it, "Let Asia have the intelligence to utilise its lands to the best advantage. Let it develop each nation's products as the result of natural selection. We can grow rice in India, we can grow wheat in Russia. We can put up a high tariff wall and grow rice in Russia, if we grow it in a hothouse; but it would not be so profitable as raising wheat. Tariff walls ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... imaginary 'monera,' the father and mother of us all. It will be time to believe a million things in a lump when one of them is fully proved in detail. We have no disposition, even with so eminent an authority as St. George Mivart, to denominate Natural Selection 'a puerile hypothesis.' We will promise to pay our respects to our 'early progenitor' of 'arboreal habits' and 'ears pointed and capable of movement,' when he is honestly identified by his ear-marks, and even to worship the original fire-mist ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... later the 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 ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... induction none the less. The primitive mind is not so much engaged in seeking an explanation of certain experiences, as it has an explanation forced upon it. To picture the savage as inventing a theory in the sense in which Darwin propounded the theory of Natural Selection is to quite misconceive the nature of the savage intelligence. But to conceive the savage as having a certain explanation suggested by the pressure of repeated experiences, and that this explanation subsequently assumes the character of a fixed belief, is well within the scope of the facts ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen |
