"Natural selection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Natural selection has acted not only upon individuals, but, in the large sense, upon groups and aggregates of groups. The restrictions upon individual life have developed in the interests of ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... responsible interference. The practice of non-interference is just as selective in its effects as the practice of state interference. It means merely that the nation is willing to accept the results of natural selection instead of preferring to substitute the results of artificial selection. In one way or another a nation is bound to recognize the results of selection. The Hamiltonian principle of national responsibility recognizes the inevitability of selection; and since it is inevitable, ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... the evolutionary Note Book of 1837. I have no doubt that in his retrospect he felt that he had not been "convinced that species were mutable" until he had gained a clear conception of the mechanism of natural selection, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... 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 at the present day Are short and fat. Isn't that funny, Subka? ...
— Rada - A Drama of War in One Act • Alfred Noyes
... and in conformity with some law of divine periodicity; but it is Man that is created in the beginning, of his full stature, even as is symbolically recorded in the Book of Genesis; not a hairy quadrumana that by the operation of the laws of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, ultimately and through endless ages, and by the most infinitesimal changes, becomes at last Plato and Caesar, Leonardo and Dante, St. Louis and Shakespeare and ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... 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 ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... 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, I have taken no day's ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... my own intense interest in it, it cannot be amiss that I state his exact position as far as he let me see it. It must be remembered that the doctrine of evolution, as he knew it, and in the only form in which it was then stated, was simply and purely that of development by natural selection acting on chance variation, and differing mainly by this from the doctrine of Lamarck, which had long been rejected by the scientific world at large. We have seen since then that this primitive doctrine has been largely supplemented ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... creation is repugnant to them, because they see that creation is really a supernatural thing. Hence come the theories of development; the "Vestiges of Creation;" the nebular hypothesis; the Darwinian theory of formation of species by natural selection; the notion of man coming out of an ape; pantheistic notions of a God so immersed in nature as to be not its intelligent guide, but only its unconscious soul; the whole universe proceeding according to ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... 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 charge ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... 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, although the reality of other kinds of change is not questioned. But ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... 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 ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Species" he accounts for the diversities of life on our globe by means of continuous development, without the intervention of special creative fiats at the origin of each species, and to this organic evolution he added the important principle of natural selection. He may be regarded as the great reformer of biology and the most distinguished naturalist of the age. Tyndall (b. 1810) has done more than any other writer to popularize great scientific truths. Huxley (b. 1825) stands foremost among ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 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 ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... and mud we are now and ever will be. After a glimpse into the life of that pure, good woman who has tried to be God's messenger to me to-night, I can find no words to express my loathing of the slough in which I and mine have mired. My only child, by the force of natural selection, bids fair to add to our number a drunkard and a libertine; and I am powerless to prevent it. The mother that should guard and guide her child, is blind to everything save that he is rich. Froth ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... NATURAL SELECTION, name given by Darwin to the survival of certain plants and animals that are fitted, and the decease contemporaneously of certain others that are not fitted, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the horse 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
... 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 races ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... 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 ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... my acquaintances found themselves embodied in some of the characters of this story I do not to deny. The principal of natural selection adapts itself to novels as to Nature, and it would have demanded an effort above my strength to have disabused myself at the desk of all the impressions of the dinner-table, and to have forgotten features which interested ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... reasonable 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 would hardly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... endowed with it came to be possessed of a power useful in that way to other forms, but not to themselves. According to the Darwinian doctrine of development, the powers that are developed in different organisms by the process of natural selection are such as are useful to themselves and not to ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... 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
... du 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 attempt ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... zoologists 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 ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... standards and living a fairly independent life. Two or three such groups would do more than many sermons to awaken attention to the problem before the race to-day. Shall man yield himself to the tendencies of natural selection and be modified out of existence by the pressure of his environment, or shall he turn upon himself some of the knowledge of Nature's forces he has gained and by "conscious evolution" begin an adaptation of the environment to the organism? ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... former generations as useful object lessons. But in the higher animals no means exist for the permanent preservation of ideas, and each step of progress must be due to the direct influence of living individuals and the indirect result of natural selection. ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... of a 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 ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Evolution then suggests that the same processes which are employed by the cattle-breeder have been in operation through untold ages. For the intention and care of the human agent, Mr. Darwin substitutes two principles; one designated as "Natural Selection," the other as "Sexual Selection." For their full development he claims unlimited time. The ground on which the Process of Natural Selection is ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... have gained general recognition and even fame by the vividness and power of a single study, like Mr. Howe with The Story of a Country Town. But each one, it will be noticed, has chosen for his field of work that part of our country wherein he passed the early and formative years of his life; a natural selection that is, perhaps, an unconscious affirmation of David Harum's aphorism: "Ev'ry hoss c'n do a thing better 'n' spryer if he's ben broke to ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... 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, forsooth, chocolate creams are preferred ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... freedom that was not mischievous. I could have been happy as a Lady Abbess—I 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
... normal 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 ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... of the present volume left England in company with Mr. A. R. Wallace—"who has since acquired wide fame in connection with the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection"—on a joint expedition up the river Amazons, for the purpose of investigating the Natural History of the vast wood-region traversed by that mighty river and its numerous tributaries. Mr. Wallace returned to England after four years' stay, and was, we ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... 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
... 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, distorted only by tradition ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... bosh! Then it was intuition that led Darwin to work out the hypothesis of natural selection. Then it was intuition that fabricated the gigantically complex score of "Die Walkure." Then it was intuition that convinced Columbus of the existence of land to the west of the Azores. All this intuition of which so much ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... any trouble, though, about casting the principal role. That was easy—a matter of natural selection. If it could be played vampishly from the ground up, and it usually could—trust Mr. Connors for that—it went without question to Vida Monte, greatest of all the luminaries in the Lobel constellation and by universal acknowledgment the best vampire in the business. In vampiring Vida Monte it was ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... evolution and methods of investigation. 1 The theory of descent and of natural selection. Evolution and adaptation. Elementary species and varieties. ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... said, "it's true. There's ideals. She's an ideal. Why, I loved her before ever I set eyes on Mamie. I loved her before I was put into pants. That old portrait, there it was pointing my destiny.... It's affinity.... It's natural selection.... ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... 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; ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... conditions for the maintenance of life (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 and species ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... the same fact; and in showing this, still more will appear. It will appear that it was the lengthening of infancy which ages ago gradually converted our forefathers from brute creatures into human creatures. It is babyhood that has made man what he is. The simple unaided operation of natural selection could never have resulted in the origination of the human race. Natural selection might have gone on forever improving the breed of the highest animal in many ways, but it could never unaided have started the process ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... 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 ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... hand who can do it, and do it artistically. Varied ingenuity California demands of her pioneers. Their native originality has been intensified by circumstances, until it has become a matter of tradition and habit. The processes of natural selection have favored the survival of the ingenious, and the quality of ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan
... actions instinctively performed by the lower animals; in this latter case the capacity of performing such actions has been gained, step by step, through the variability of the mental organs and natural selection, without any conscious intelligence on the part of the animal during each successive generation. No doubt, as Mr. Wallace has argued, much of the intelligent work done by man is due to imitation and not to reason; but there is this great difference between his actions and many ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... 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
... Scotch clergy of the middle of the nineteenth century denouncing the use of chloroform in obstetrics, because it is seeking "to avoid one part of the primeval curse on woman". Here is Bishop Wilberforce of Oxford anathematizing Darwin: "The principle of natural selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God"; it "contradicts the revealed relation of creation to its creator"; it "is inconsistent with the fulness of His glory"; it is "a dishonoring view of nature". And the Bishop settled the matter ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... parts, producing ultimately the perfected organisms that we see. Unfortunately the preserved portions of the writings of Empedocles do not enlighten us as to the precise way in which final evolution was supposed to be effected; although the idea of endless experimentation until natural selection resulted in survival of the fittest seems not far afield from certain of the poetical assertions. Thus: "As divinity was mingled yet more with divinity, these things (the various members) kept coming together in whatever way each ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 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, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... other side, about the sugar plantations of the West Indies and the sugar refineries of Europe, robbery, laziness, and very often drunkenness become quite usual with the bees. We thus see that anti-social instincts continue to exist amidst the bees as well; but natural selection continually must eliminate them, because in the long run the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations. The cunningest and the shrewdest ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... many foolish virgins in the future state as in this. As I am a 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 ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... varied subsequent work revolved round these, for him, essential problems—How do species change, and how do they become adapted to their environment? He never ceased to be essentially a field naturalist, and his theory of natural selection would have been an empty and abstract thing if his vast knowledge and understanding of the "web of life" had not given it colour and form. He never lost touch with the living thing in its living, breathing reality—even plants he rightly regarded ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... linguistic theorizer. Let it simply be agreed, as it now is by all science, that the evolution of form is a universal and well evidenced principle, working out through the various well established and comprehensible incidents, such as natural selection, adaptation to environment, and so on—yet this statement of the fact is not an explanation of its cause. And every scientific and logical requirement will be equally, and better, met by regarding all forms, whether physical, linguistic, or of any kind, as coming, or rather brought, into being ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... Darwinian theory of development and the principle of natural selection! I should like to see a garden let to run in accordance with it. If I had left my vegetables and weeds to a free fight, in which the strongest specimens only should come to maturity, and the weaker go to the wall, I can clearly see that I should have had a pretty mess of ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... may be of each slight difference in the offspring from their parents—and a cause for each must exist—it is the steady accumulation, through natural selection of such differences, when beneficial to the individual, that gives rise to all the more important modifications of structure which the innumerable beings on the face of the earth are enabled to struggle with each other, and the best ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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 ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... pavement of Piccadilly sprouted in a race of giants who were as trees walking. They were mostly young giants, who had great beauty of complexion, of course, and as great beauty of feature. They were doubtless the result of a natural selection, to which money for buying perfect conditions had contributed as much as the time necessary for growing a type. Mostly their faces were gentle and kind, and only now and then hard or cruel; but one need not be especially averse to the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Darwin's name is bound up as closely as that of Newton with the theory of gravitation, nothing seems to be further from the mind of the present generation than any attempt to smother it with ridicule or to crush it by vehemence of denunciation. "The struggle for existence," and "Natural selection," have become household words and every-day conceptions. The reality and the importance of the natural processes on which Darwin founds his deductions are no more doubted than those of growth and multiplication; ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... in June, 1894, which may be accounted for in this way. In 1921 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 to ...
— Life History of the Kangaroo Rat • Charles T. Vorhies and Walter P. Taylor
... 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 and ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... labelled 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)
... one who had died at the orphanage, had been the heir to the estates. And when he read The Slaves of Life a second time, he had to admit that the upper classes live at the mercy of the lower classes, and when he read Darwin again he could not deny that natural selection, in our time, was anything but natural. But facts were facts and remained unalterable, in spite of all the doctor and the socialists might say ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... matters little how our own particular opinions may 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 live in, but does ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... was, to a certain extent, the result of natural selection. Most of the officers had chosen their wives very carefully, and this had brought about a fine similarity in their views, a similarity which even found expression in the rather unattractive arrangement of their dwellings, in which the upholsterer's ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... Athenaeum or the Astor Library, and then told your audience what you had read. Now, it appeared, that simple process was no longer adequate. People had tired of familiar "subjects"; it was the fashion to be interested in things that one hadn't always known about—natural selection, animal magnetism, sociology and comparative folk-lore; while, in literature, the demand had become equally difficult to meet, since Matthew Arnold had introduced the habit of studying the "influence" of one author on another. ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species. Even Lyell and Hooker, though they would listen with interest to me, never seemed to agree. I tried once or twice to explain to able men what I meant by Natural Selection, but signally failed. What I believe was strictly true is that innumerable well-observed facts were stored in the minds of naturalists ready to take their proper places as soon as any theory which would receive them was sufficiently explained. Another element in the success of the book was its ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... 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 means ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... 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, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... insist that any real genius among their youthful competitors "would out," and that any assistance would but make life too soft for the youngsters, and go to swell the growing "menace" of bad verse by mitigating the primal rigors of natural selection. No doubt the generation of writers older than Wordsworth quite innocently uttered these very same sentiments in voices of deep authority when it was proposed to offer this young person a chance to compose in peace. No. One fears that the attitude of these veterans was not wholly judicial. ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... motives led to the choice of the moon-god as the patron of Ur, lies beyond the scope of our knowledge. Due allowance must be made for that natural selection, which takes place in the realm of thought as much as in the domain of nature. Attention has already been called to the predominance given by the Babylonians to the moon over the sun. The latter is expressly called the "offspring of the lord of brilliant beginning," that is, the ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... 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 Man ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... time scale 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
... 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 ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers |
