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Darwinian   /dˌɑrwˈɪniən/   Listen
Darwinian

adjective
1.
Of or relating to Charles Darwin's theory of organic evolution.



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"Darwinian" Quotes from Famous Books



... are streets, however various, to the ways of error that a great flock will take in open country—minutely, individually wrong, making mistakes upon hardly perceptible occasions, or none—"minute fortuitous variations in any possible direction," as used to be said in exposition of the Darwinian theory? A vast outlying public, like that of Tennyson, may make you as many blunders as it has heads; but the accurate clear poet proved his meaning to all accurate perceptions. Where he hesitates, his is the sincere pause of process and uncertainty. It has been said that Tennyson, ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell

... representative chemist than Professor Roscoe could have been obtained for Section B; in C, Geology; Mr. W. T. Blanford, the head of the Indian Geological Survey, is sure to do honour to his subject; in Section D, Biology, Professor Moseley, a man of thoroughly Darwinian type of mind, will preside; in F, Economic Science, Sir Richard Temple will be a host in himself; while in G, Mechanical Science, Sir F J. Bramwell is sure to be vigorous and original; finally, in the new section H, Anthropology, Dr. E. B. Tylor is the very man that ought ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh

... which came from other sources and have become attached to it until it seemed to sustain them. The proper doctrine of evolution is entirely compatible with the Bible. The great Dr. Hodge declared that the consistent Darwinian must be an atheist. For that matter, Shelley defended himself by saying that, of course, "the consistent Newtonian must necessarily be an atheist." But fifty years have made great changes in the doctrine of evolution, and the old scare has been over for some time. Newton ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee

... prostitution might be regarded as an economic evil. He found that sex morality was regarded by some as a useful taboo; psychology taught him that repression could be as harmful as excess; the collapse of the Darwinian optimists, who believed that all curves were upward, left him with the inner conviction that everything, including principle, was in a state of flux. And his intellectual guides, first Shaw, and then, when Shaw became vieux jeu, De Gourmont, favored ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... the eating of the apple, they say: "As out of this allegory grow the doctrines of original sin, the fall of man and of woman the author of all our woes, and the curses on the serpent, the woman and the man, the Darwinian theory of the gradual growth of the race from a lower to a higher type of animal life ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson

... this country by Agassiz and his followers will remember the four classes—Radiates, Articulates, Mollusks, and Vertebrates. Agassiz was such a wonderful teacher and so genial and so lovable a man that his opposition to evolution held back the advance of the Darwinian idea in America as Cuvier's influence had held back the Lamarckian idea in Europe. For the brilliant Cuvier simply laughed before his students at each "new folly" of Buffon and of Lamarck. Under this ridicule the influence of both ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... highest scientist to be associated with others, of less scientific attainment but of equal integrity, in this comparatively new field of enquiry, it may lead to popular error to institute a connection. It is still fresh in the mind how the Darwinian hypothesis was utterly misconceived by the popular mind, the suggestion that man was descended from the apes being generally quoted as a correct expression of Darwin's theory, whereas he never suggested any such thing, but ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial

... greatly strengthened the biological evidence for the evolutionary hypothesis. That hypothesis was upheld, however, by evidence drawn not merely from biology, but from many other sources. Moreover, while the Darwinian theory of natural selection, supplemented as it was by the adoption of the Lamarkian factors,—the effect of use and disuse and the assumed transmissibility of acquired character,—merely attempted to explain the mode in which the changes in organic life have taken ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord

... object to having man's pedigree traced on one-third of him only—and that the lowest third. Fairbairn, in his "Philosophy of Christianity," lays down a sound proposition when he says that it is not sufficient to explain man as an animal; that it is necessary to explain man in history—and the Darwinian theory does not do this. The ape, according to this theory, is older than man and yet the ape is still an ape while man is the author of the marvelous civilization ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... account of his failing health he had broken down in his friend's study, and wept like an 'Europaer', and lamented, "I shall never finish my work!" Some papers which he had begun to write for the Magazine, in contravention of the Darwinian theory, or part of it, which it is known Agassiz did not accept, remained part of the work which he never finished. After his death, I wished Professor Jeffries Wyman to write of him in the Atlantic, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... theory of borrowing. That our theory is inconsistent with the general doctrine of evolution we cannot admit, if we are allowed to agree with Mr. Darwin's statement about the high mental faculties which first led man to sympathetic, and then to wild beliefs. We do not pretend to be more Darwinian than Mr. Darwin, who compares "these miserable and indirect results of our higher faculties" to "the occasional mistakes of the instincts ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... on purely Darwinian principles! It is the best adapted tongue, and therefore it survives in the struggle for existence. It is the easiest to learn, at least orally. It has got rid of the effete rubbish of genders; simplified immensely its declensions and conjugations; ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... throughout his life pursued the plan of demonstrating all the resemblances he could discover between Plato and the Old Testament, much in the same way as in our time some have striven to point out the surprising agreement of the Darwinian theory with Genesis. He was called the Jewish Plato, and at Alexandria it was said: "Philo imitates Plato or Plato ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... one did not hesitate to accept the Darwinian theory, on the word of scientific men, though the whole of visible and recorded experience seemed to contradict it. Even stranger than the amazing complexity of the whole scheme, was the incredible patience ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... the political divisions there are important landmarks in the history of thought. During the 'sixties, while the power of Prussia was rising to its culmination in the Franco-Prussian War, the Darwinian theory of development was gaining command in biology. To many thinkers there has appeared a clear connexion between that biological doctrine and the 'imperialism', Teutonic and other, which was so marked a feature of the time. In any case 'post-Darwinian' might well describe the scientific thought ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... you do but carry your difficulty with you into the vegetable world; for, how could there be seeds if there had been no plants to seed them? and if you carry up your thoughts through the vista of the Darwinian eternity up to the primaeval fungus, still the primaeval fungus must have had a humus, from which to draw into its venerable vessels the nourishment of its archetypal existence, and that humus must itself be a "false mark" of ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... cranial symmetry, depression at root of nose, defective development of calves, hypertrichosis and other anomalies of hair, adherent or absent lobule, prominent zigoma, prominent forehead or frontal bones, bad implantation of teeth, Darwinian tubercle of ear, thin vertical lips. These signs are separately of little or no importance, though together not without significance as an ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... and he bought dress suits, He crammed his feet into bright tight boots, And to start his life on a brand-new plan, He christened himself Darwinian Man! But it would not do, The scheme fell through - For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey craved, Was a radiant Being, With a brain far-seeing - While a Man, however well-behaved, At best ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert

... condition exist at the South? It could not be otherwise. Any one who has travelled there must have his faith in the evolution of some men from the lower animals immeasurably strengthened. Rev. Dr. Taylor, of New York, has said that he knows that the Darwinian theory cannot be true, because, if it were, "an Englishman's right arm would have developed into an umbrella long ago." But Dr. Taylor would find faces in the South which, from their resemblance to lower orders of life, might weaken his ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various

... all sorts of speculation and thinking tend to fall under the formula of the dominant thought of the age. For example, after the Newtonian Theory of the universe had been developed, almost all thinking tended to express itself in the analogies of the Newtonian Theory, and since the Darwinian Theory has reigned amongst us, everybody is likely to express whatever he wishes to expound in terms of ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson

... are more Darwinian than Mr. Darwin himself. I do not mean that their beliefs in organic evolution are more decided; though I shall be supposed to mean this by the mass of readers, who identify Mr. Darwin's great contribution to the theory of organic evolution, with the theory of organic evolution itself, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... Spartans a strong nation, because at that time bodily strength was almost the only ideal of the people. He understood the value of hardness but not that of work. The importance of selective elimination of the diseased and weak was apparent to his pre-Darwinian intuition, but in his time natural laws were not understood. However, in spite of their failings, the laws of Lycurgus succeeded up to a certain point in making the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... president of the Army War College, has a pet rib-nosed baboon, an animal of uncommon intelligence but imperfectly beautiful. Returning to his apartment one evening, the General was surprised and pained to find Adam (for so the creature is named, the general being a Darwinian) sitting up for him and wearing his master's best uniform coat, epaulettes ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce

... this manner, by a gradual modification and improvement of inadequate working hypotheses, by the slow substitution of correctness for error. Thus monotheism and the doctrine of the soul may be in no worse case than the Copernican theory, or the theory of the circulation of the blood, or the Darwinian theory; itself the successor of innumerable savage guesses, conjectures of Empedocles, ideas of Cuvier, of the elder Darwin, of ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... Letters," Mr. Huxley's obituary notice of Charles Darwin has appeared. (Chapter II./2. "Proc. R. Soc." volume 44, 1888, and "Collected Essays (Darwiniana)," page 253, 1899.) This masterly paper is, in our opinion, the finest of the great series of Darwinian essays which we owe to Mr. Huxley. We would venture to recommend it to our readers as the best possible introduction to these pages. There is, however, one small point in which we differ from Mr. Huxley. In discussing the growth of Mr. Darwin's ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... exhibit that fundamental resemblance in this respect which betokens a community of origin, a common foundation on the general facts and the obvious suggestions of modern science. Indeed,—to turn the point of a taking simile directed against Darwin,—the difference between the Darwinian and the Owenian hypotheses may, after all, be only that between homoeopathic and heroic doses of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... Aurelius could, with little reference to evolution, accept man's nature, or Nature in the wider sense, as marking out for man the round of his duties. A modern Darwinian might fall back upon much the same standard, while clearly conscious of the fact that man's nature is not something unchangeable, and while inclined to view Nature in general with different eyes from those of the Roman Stoic. No sensible evolutionist would maintain that ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... The Darwinian hypothesis has the merit of being eminently simple and comprehensible in principle, and its essential positions may be stated in a very few words: all species have been produced by the development ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... lord; Lizzy was pretty though a fisherman's daughter: a sort of Darwinian selection had apparently found place between them; but as the same entertainment was going on in two houses at once, and there was naturally a good deal of passing and repassing between them, no one took the least ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... science of to-day are beginning to forget what their fathers told them of the fierce battle which had to be fought, before the upholders of the Darwinian theory of the origin of species were able to convince those for whom the older view, that species are, and always have been, absolutely distinct, had become a matter of supreme scientific, and even ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir

... laughed over the stories as we sat at breakfast with my coachman in the kitchen. T'yonni said that the deacon of the Protestant church expressed a belief that the Paumotuans or even the French might have followed the Darwinian course of descent, but that Tahitians could not swallow a doctrine that linked them in relationship with Uritaata. The Tongans, Polynesians like themselves, had a tradition that God made the Tongan first, then the pig, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... statement at St. Helena, that all the animals form an ascending series, leading up to man. [Footnote: Dr. O'Meara's "A Voice from St. Helena."] The skeleton of a prehistoric man discovered in the Neanderthal cave, which was supposed to have proved the Darwinian theory, does not suggest a figure similar to the "Faun" of Praxiteles, but the followers of Darwin have frequently adverted to the Hellenic traditions of fauns and satyrs in support of their theory. Hawthorne, however, has made a long stride beyond Darwin, for he has ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... 3. Leaving aside the pre-Darwinian writers, like Toussenel, Fee, and many others, several works containing many striking instances of mutual aid—chiefly, however, illustrating animal intelligence were issued previously to that date. I may mention those of Houzeau, Les facultes etales ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... species, the corollary, that they are of one origin, may be expected to follow. Those who allow them to be of one species must admit an actual diversification into strongly marked and persistent varieties, and so admit the basis of fact upon which the Darwinian hypothesis is built; while those, on the other hand, who recognize a diversity of human species, will hardly be able to maintain that such species were primordial and supernatural in the common sense of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... been sure to not a great many years ago. Why, you may go to a tea-party where the clergyman's wife shows her best cap and his daughters display their shining ringlets, and you will hear the company discussing the Darwinian theory of the origin of the human race as if it were as harmless a question as that of the lineage of a spinster's lapdog. You may see a fine lady who is as particular in her genuflections as any Buddhist or Mahometan saint in his manifestations of reverence, who will ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... evil exists; and the question whether evil predominates over good, can only, I should say, be decided by an appeal to experience. One source of evil is the conflict of interests. Every beast preys upon others; and man, according to the old saying, is a wolf to man. All that the Darwinian or any other theory can do is, to enable us to trace the consequences of this fact in certain directions; but it neither creates the fact nor makes it more or less an essential part of the process. It "explains" certain phenomena, in the sense of showing their connection with previous ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen

... "selection" and "variation," and a grave problem was presented by this last. How are we to account for the variations of living beings, together with the persistence of their type? Herein lies the problem of the origin of species. Three different solutions have been put forward. There is the "Neo-Darwinian" view which attributes variation to the differences inherent in the germ borne by the individual, and not to the experience or behaviour of the individual in the course of his existence. Then there is the ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... ulcerations, fecal concretions, fissure in ano, and that they may hypertrophy and set up tenesmus and other troubles. The presence of human tails has given rise to discussion between friends and opponents of the Darwinian theory. By some it is considered a reversion to the lower species, while others deny this and claim it to be simply a ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... there was a new intellectual criticism reminding one superficially of the Voltairean, but in reality founded far more on Darwinian ideas. The older "philosophers" had blamed the Reformers for not coming up to a modern standard; the new evolutionists censured {730} them for falling below the standard of their own age. Moreover, the critique of the new atheism was more searching ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... amazingly, during the long discourses that were delivered to him by his master, and indeed looked so wonderfully human in his knowingness, that it only required a speaking tongue and a shaved face to constitute him an unanswerable proof of the truth of the Darwinian theory of the origin of ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne

... show that although Froebel was pre-Darwinian, he had been in close touch with scientists who were working at theories of development, and that he was largely influenced by Krause, who applied the idea of organic development to all departments of social science. It was because Froebel was himself, even in 1826, ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... bird. "I'm used to them, of course, and I've proved dozens of times that there's no such thing as hypnotism; but the effect of a snake's eye on very young and inexperienced birds is inconceivable, and not to be reconciled to the Darwinian theory or Mendel's law. What between snakes, hawks, and women's hats, the life of ...
— If You Touch Them They Vanish • Gouverneur Morris

... that the following passage from Pliny has ever been cited in connection with the Darwinian theories but it is worth ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... contains the fullest exposition we have seen of the rise and history of the abstract Darwinian theories, combined with a critical explanation of their practical ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl

... will make it the easier for you, when you try. I am so far, at least, a Darwinian as ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... from long practice had grown to detect the exact degree of urgency in every call, with the agility of his Darwinian ancestry quickened by his native wit, dashed over to the desk under which the Rhode Island maps reposed. He swung the big gray-bound volume up onto the broad, flat counter with all the skill of a successful vaudeville artist, and none ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... believed to be cheap took possession of men and translated itself into politics which he knew to be nasty. I may summarise it, in its own jargon, as the philosophy of the Superman, and succinctly describe it as an attempt to stretch a part of the Darwinian hypothesis and make it cover the whole of man's life and conduct. I need not remind you how fatally its doctrine has flattered, in our time and in our country, the worst instincts of the half-educated: but let ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... aim and scientific guidance. Power has been held by the "God-given" or the "cleverest"; seldom has the power been given to the "fittest" in the sense of the most capable "to do." Those who speak of the "survival of the fittest," as in the Darwinian theory of animals, bark an animal language. This rule, being natural only in the life of plants and animals and appropriate only to the lower forms of physical life, cannot, except with profound change of meaning, be applied to the time-binding class ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski

... the stage as one of the curiosities of the Centennial Exposition of 1889, it has made little progress as yet in Catholic France. Even at the theatres in Paris, I am glad to say, the popular instinct still regulates the queue on principles quite inconsistent with the Darwinian maxims of 'every man for himself,' and 'the devil take the hindmost.' It will be an evil day for invalids and cripples bitten with the drama when the 'struggle for life' comes to be logically developed into the right of the strongest men to get ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... Darwinian in the theory of evolution is accordingly an application of mechanism, a proof that mechanism lies at the basis of life and morals. The Aristotelian notion of development, however, was too deeply rooted in tradition for ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... another by blood or by lifelong acquaintance as to constitute one large family. Well-born, well-bred, and distinguished by charming and singularly simple manners, they were content to be what they were, and the Darwinian competition for merely fashionable or intellectual brilliance, however prevalent elsewhere, was, with few exceptions, to them virtually unknown. Yet whenever anything in the way of formal pomp was necessary, they were fully equal to the occasion. The well-known dinners given by Mrs. Washington ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... beasts in Nineveh, and a little squat monkey, developing into a devil, is wittily characterized by Ruskin as reversing the Darwinian theory. ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison

... paragraphs have a certain historical value, for they put what was evidently an important idea to an accomplished naturalist a century ago. They present us, in that aspect, with an interesting bit of pre-Darwinian generalisation. ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott



Words linked to "Darwinian" :   proponent, exponent, neo-Darwinian, Darwinism, advocate, advocator, Darwin



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