"Natural selection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is clear, that in the processes of natural selection those tribes would survive whose rules of morality did in general promote welfare. And it is the business of reflection, says the Empiricist, not to accept either his own conviction or those of others on ethical questions, but in cases of ambiguity to establish, ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... space and time. In that I found myself placed, a creature relatively infinitesimal, needing and struggling. It was clear to me, by a hundred considerations, that I in my body upon this planet Earth, was the outcome of countless generations of conflict and begetting, the creature of natural selection, the heir of good and bad ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... and rudimentary condition in some of his animal associates, are of such an 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, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... cases the stronger of the two birds would retain the nest, and thus assume the duties of foster-parent. Starting from this reasonable premise concerning the prehistoric cuckoo, it is not difficult to see how natural selection, working through ages of evolution by heredity, might have developed the habitual resignation of the evicted bird, perhaps to the ultimate entire abandonment of the function of incubation. Inasmuch as "we have ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... swift-footed creatures are circumscribed in their wanderings. The first large river almost inevitably bars their way, and certainly the first salt sea becomes an impassable obstacle. Better locomotion may be classed as one of the prime aims of the old natural selection; for in that primordial day the race was to the swift as surely as the battle to the strong. But man, already pre-eminent in the common domain because of other faculties, was not content with the one form of locomotion afforded by his lower limbs. He ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... occurrence; while, on the 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 are eliminated in favour of those who ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... folk in response to a 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
... training, military training? That's what we want. It benefits the health. Sets a man up. Look at old Peter's legs, He's a disgrace to the nation, a disgrace! Nobody shoots him, either. So he spoils Everything; for you know, you must admit, Subka, that war means natural selection, Survival of the fittest, don't you see? For instance, I survive, and you survive; Don't we? So Peter shouldn't spoil it all. They say that all the tall young men in France Were killed in the Napoleonic wars, So that most Frenchmen at the present ...
— Rada - A Drama of War in One Act • Alfred Noyes
... and the only really effective one, is to make every kind of education free up to the age of twenty-one for all boys and girls who desire it. The majority will be tired of education before that age, and will prefer to begin other work sooner; this will lead to a natural selection of those with strong interests in some pursuit requiring a long training. Among those selected in this way by their own inclinations, probably almost all tho have marked abilities of the kind in question ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... change in the form of natural selection is one of the principles transforming biological inheritance; but whether the acquired characters of parents are even in the least degree inherited by the offspring, thus becoming innate characters, is one of the important biological problems of recent years. Into this problem we have ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... is the 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 other hylotheistic and purely hypothetical ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... God. It is, however, better to say that 'God alone knows the number for whom is reserved eternal happiness,' as the prayer for the living and the dead expresses it."(592) Whether God will round out the number of the elect by suddenly precipitating the end of the world or by a sort of "natural selection," is an open question. To assume the latter could hardly be reconciled with the dogma of the universality of His saving will. St. Augustine seems to ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... and Politics'; a work which does for human society what the 'Origin of Species' does for organic life, expounding its method of progress from very low if not the lowest forms to higher ones. Indeed, one of its main lines is only a special application of Darwin's "natural selection" to societies, noting the survival of the strongest (which implies in the long run the best developed in all virtues that make for social cohesion) through conflict; but the book is so much more than that, in spite of its heavy ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... well-established facts of genetics and heredity, because those facts do not fit the world-picture demanded by their political doctrines. And on the same sector, a religious sect recently tried, in some sections successfully, to outlaw the teaching of evolution by natural selection." ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... imagination, with exactly similar 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 ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... said of the credit due to other scientists for investigation or discovery in natural selection, the preeminence of Darwin in this field is undisputed. If of any scientific book it can be said that its appearance was "epoch-making" it is true of Darwin's work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... shall employ others that are higher to even greater effect. In other case it is not worth the effort of acquiring, nor is it likely that anybody of a radically selfish nature will take the trouble to acquire it. Natural selection is the fine sieve which the gods use in their prospecting. The gross material ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... setting forth the present conditions, with our excessive elimination of higher types, and undue multiplication of lower types, the racial degeneration caused by the faulty and anti-selective working of the marriage system in modern capitalist society, so that in our existing civilisation unconscious natural selection has largely ceased to work towards the improvement of the human breed, he proceeds to consider the possible remedies. The frequent impatience of the Socialist, and Social Reformers generally, with eugenic proposals has a certain degree of justification in the fact that many evils thoughtlessly ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... 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, and in some cases ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... 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
... I observed on this and other occasions that Russian gypsies are very naif. And as it is in human nature to prefer sitting by a pretty girl, these Slavonian Romanys so arrange it according to the principles of natural selection—or natural politeness—that, when a stranger is in their gates, the two prettiest girls in their possession sit at his right and left, the two less attractive next again, et seriatim. So at once a damsel of comely mien, arrayed in black silk attire, of faultless ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... transmitted to 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 book in another part. The ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... 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 species, ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... in elaborating his theory of Natural Selection he attributed too little to external surroundings. Life ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... into small cliques, and effectively limit the selection of the individual to his own clique, is to postpone the Superman for eons, if not for ever. Not only should every person be nourished and trained as a possible parent, but there should be no possibility of such an obstacle to natural selection as the objection of a countess to a navvy or of a duke to a charwoman. Equality is essential to good breeding; and equality, as all economists know, is ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... say, then, that nothing but the void exists? The void is filled by a Presence. There is a controlling, directing, overarching will in every page, every verse, that there is no escape from. Design and purpose, natural selection, growth, culmination, are just as pronounced as ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... 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 ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... necessary to these energetic creative types? Was it the fact that the drive of life towards action, as distinguished from contemplation, arose out of sex and needed to be refreshed by the reiteration of that motive? It was a plausible proposition: it marched with all the doctor's ideas of natural selection and of the conditions of a survival that have made us what we are. It was in tune with ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... this, that the small group facing west in the fountain is The Dawn of Life, then comes Natural Selection which develops into The Survival of the Fittest, or The Development ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... It is certainly inconsistent with the teaching of Christ, and Mr. Brooke calls himself a Christian. It is no less inconsistent with all we know of Nature, who is supremely indifferent to the fate of individuals. To talk so consumedly of God's love in this age of Darwinism, with its law of natural selection based on a universal struggle for existence, is to fly in the face of common sense. But here, alas, as in so many other cases, the voice of reason is drowned ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... to the agriculturists of Greece and Rome and those of modern times which are thought most nearly to resemble them. Besides this, there is always room for doubt whether the habits of plants long grown in different countries may not have been so changed by domestication or by natural selection, that the conditions of temperature and humidity which they required twenty centuries ago were different from those at present demanded for their advantageous cultivation. [Footnote: Probably no cultivated vegetable ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... 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 ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... upon the theory of evolution, the gradual unfolding of social and moral perfection due to the constant pressure of circumstances, and the ultimate survival of what was most fit to survive. It was almost by a principle of natural selection that mankind was supposed to have determined the necessity of civil authority, slavery, private property, and the rest. The pragmatic test of life had been applied ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... 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 life-history of animals ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... searcher? Then, let it be uppermost on the book sought also. Follow the name of the author by the briefest possible words selected from the title which will suffice to characterize the subject of the work. Thus, the title—"On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection", by Charles Darwin, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... the more intelligent fishes. (Surely, considering the importance which is given to such an accident in female offspring, marriageable men, or what the new English calls "intending bridegrooms," should look at themselves dispassionately in the glass, since their natural selection of a mate prettier than themselves is not certain to bar the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... 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
... little lengthening would be absolutely no good, as the cracks in the trees are 2 inches or 3 inches deep. It must have varied from the ordinary length to one twice as long at once. There is no other way. Where does natural selection come in? In this, as in scores of other instances, it shows the ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... air of the streets, whilst the better-off child is kept indoors and becomes flabby and less resistant to minor ailments. The statistics of infantile mortality suggest that the children of the poorer schools have also gone through a more severe selection; disease weeding out by natural selection, and the less fit having succumbed before school age, the residue are of sturdier type than in schools or classes where such ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... 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 and ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... of the same size. We here see great variability in many important characters; and if any of these variations were of service to the plant, or were correlated with useful functional differences, the species is in that state in which natural selection might readily do much for ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... man in 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 human ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... Dr. Wells developed a theory of evolution by natural selection to account for varieties in the human race. About 1820 Dean Herbert, eminent as an authority in horticulture, avowed his conviction that species are but fixed varieties. In 1831 Patrick Matthews stumbled upon and stated the main doctrine ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... to the Theory of Natural Selection (p. 167), A. R. Wallace has recorded cases of simultaneous variation among insects, apparently due to climate or other strictly local causes. He found that the butterflies of the family Papilionidae, and some others, became similarly modified ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... knows, the great majority of Americans, upon reaching the age of natural selection, are elected to the American Institute of Arts and Ethics, which is, so to speak, the Ellis Island of ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... 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 ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... 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
... modern science, but it is an 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
... reaffirmed that the soul has not only its old excuse for being in the unthinkability of an automatic universe and the necessity of an intentional first cause, but with Evolution, in the regard of some scientists, tottering on its throne, and Natural Selection entering the twilight into which the elder pagan deities have vanished, is newly warranted in claiming existence as that indestructible life-property or organizing power which characterizes kind through kind from everlasting to everlasting. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... all this gladness and grandeur, by the decree of Dr. Fenneben, was given in fee simple to these three hundred young people for the hours of one perfect day—their annual autumn holiday. No wonder they filled the air with shouts. And before the singing had ceased the crowd broke into groups by natural selection, ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... himself a harem through whom he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it were, a mere lateral form of natural selection—a survival of the fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability, producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in the resulting offspring. I need not dwell ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Irving. Then there is the sub-nosed monkey, 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 ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... workshop has its foreman, who comes, it would seem, by natural selection. That is to say, here, as elsewhere, the fittest man comes to the front. But it is a principle of their polity that men shall not be confined to one kind of labor. If brickmakers are needed, and shoemakers are not busy, the shoe shop is closed, and the shoemakers ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... nourish him to the fullness of growth in soul and mind. True many come who, seemingly, were better drowned like surplus puppies or kittens. But who shall select those to survive? Grecian wisdom once attempted to improve on "natural selection" and Greece is the ghost of a vanished glory. Why shouldn't Ginx have drowned his Baby—or himself before the multiplication in the result of which ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... favorable variation. It is the unwritten law of nature that one race must die that another may live, this other, in its turn, subserving the same end. Without this law nature would be a chaotic impossibility. If natural selection were a real agency, we ought to meet with frequent, if not constant, evidences of transition, and a slow and gradual, but perceptible improvement in species, especially marked in those whose generations succeed each other rapidly. But we see nothing of the kind. But did selection really ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... Only by generations of natural selection could we expect to make man immune to the evils of bad air. The robust Indian and the Negro, whose races, until the last generation or two, roamed in the open, fell easy prey to tuberculosis as soon as they adopted ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... 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 to survive, marry, and hand down their infirmities to future generations. ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... 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
... 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 it as ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... song and movement, have been developed through the preference of the females? the stronger and more ornamental males becoming in this way the parents of each successive generation. Wallace, as is well known, opposed Darwin's view, preferring to regard sexual selection as a manifestation of natural selection. He has been followed by other naturalists, who have denied this creative power of love, being unable to credit conscious choice by the females of the most gifted males. The controversy on the question has ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... 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 by asking Huxley whether ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... 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 cover ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... struggling. And what were they on their heights? Had they won Brotherhood? Or had they learned that the law of love imposed the penalty of weakness and decay? Was strife, life? Was the rule of all the universe the pitiless rule of natural selection? And, and most immediately and poignantly, were their far conclusions, their long-won wisdoms, shut even then in the huge, metallic heart of the Red One, waiting for the first earth-man to read? Of one thing he was certain: No drop of red dew shaken from the lion-mane of some ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... attributed by Mr. Left to Darwin or Huxley or perhaps one of the Brownings—it is unimportant to note just which one, for Mr. Left gleaned from a wide circle of intellects. The interesting thing is that about the time these love affairs we are considering were brewing, Mr. Left wrote: "If the natural selection of love is the triumph of evolution on this planet, if the free choice of youth and maiden, unhampered by class or nationality, or wealth, or age, or parental interference, or thought of material advantage, is the ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... refuge have been its excuse for existence, and the undoing of the infidel. But service with the Catholic Church is emphasized only for the priesthood—the laity being simply asked to define, submit and pay. Culture and character are left to natural selection, and the thought that any person but a priest could have either is a very modern hypothesis. In way of Religion by Definition, Saint Paul was the great modern exponent. That the Theological Quibblers' Club existed long before his time we know full well. In fact, the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... 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 ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... and then children and stout honest work for them, work too for the State in which they live; a life of self-devotion, indeed, and for sunset a decent pride—that is the happy life. Rest assured that is the happy life; the life Natural Selection has been shaping for man since life began. So a man may go happy from the cradle to the grave—at least—passably happy. And to do this needs just three things—a sound body, a sound intelligence, and a sound will ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... as he could walk. When he grew older, he shipped on a merchant-man or whaler, and in those warlike times, when our large merchant-marine was compelled to rely pretty much on itself for protection, each craft had to be well handled; all who were not were soon weeded out by a process of natural selection, of which the agents were French picaroons, Spanish buccaneers, and Malay pirates. It was a rough school, but it taught Jack to be both skilful and self-reliant; and he was all the better fitted to become a man-of-war's man, because he knew more about fire-arms than most of his kind in foreign ...
— The Naval War of 1812 • Theodore Roosevelt
... inheritance of the modifications of structure resulting from use and disuse. There is no recognition of that further cause disclosed in Mr. Darwin's work, published two and a half years later—the indirect adaptation resulting from the natural selection of favourable variations. The multiplication of effects is, however, equally illustrated in whatever way the adaptation to changing conditions is effected, or if it is effected in both ways, as I hold. I may add that there ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... suggested that the latter may have derived his views from the eloquent Italian friar[10]. But for this suggestion, I think that there is no real foundation. Darwin and Wallace, as we shall see later, were quite unconscious of their having been forestalled in the theory of Natural Selection by Dr Wells and Patrick Matthew; and Hutton, like his successor Lyell, in all probability arrived, quite independently, and by different lines of reasoning, at conclusions identical with those ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... 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 of ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... by maintaining approximately an equal number of the sexes, and nature frowns upon promiscuity by penalizing it with sterility and neglect of the few children that are born, so that in the struggle for existence the fittest survive by a process of natural selection. A study of biology and anthropology gives added evidence that nature favors monogamy, for in the highest grade of animals below man the monogamic relation holds almost without exception, and low-grade human ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... described. Herein indeed lay Darwin's 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 ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... 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
... 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 foul, ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... moulds the inner nature has the power of selecting or attracting such conditions or environments as will help it in its way of manifestation. This process corresponds in some respects to the law of "natural selection." ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... where he remained for eight years, making collections of geological specimens. It is one of the most remarkable coincidences in human experience that Wallace and Darwin simultaneously and without mutual understanding of any kind achieved the discovery of the law of natural selection and the evolution hypothesis by which biological science has been completely revolutionized. This absolutely independent accomplishment by two scientists amazed them as well as the whole scientific world. The voluminous works of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... natural selection? How does it lead to change in animals? Does natural selection still operate among human beings? (See a ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... doubted that the gradual evolution of our actual moral ideas—our actual ideas about what is right or wrong in particular cases—has been largely influenced by education, environment, association, social pressure, superstition, perhaps natural selection—in short, all the agencies by which naturalistic Moralists try to account for the existence of Morality. Even Euclid, or whatever his modern substitute may be, has to be taught; but that does not show that Geometry is an arbitrary ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... 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 might chance." ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... 'voluntary' has misled you," I put in. "It isn't the word exactly. The divisions among us are rather a process of natural selection. You will see, as you get better acquainted with the workings of our institutions, that there are no arbitrary distinctions here but the fitness of the work for the man and the man for the work determines the social rank that ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... '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 ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... readiness is delayed until the individuality is sufficiently developed to have its own demands. I venture to think one cause of unhappiness in marriages is, that each person's peculiar self, was not, at the time of engagement, sufficiently grown for a natural selection of the suitable, that is, the correspondent; and that the development which follows is in most cases the development of what is reciprocally non-correspondent, and works for separation and not approximation. The only thing to overcome this or any other disjunctive ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... 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 to ...
— Married • August Strindberg
... facetious tone—that the perfection of mechanical appliances must ultimately supersede limbs; the perfection of chemical devices, digestion; that such organs as hair, external nose, teeth, ears, and chin were no longer essential parts of the human being, and that the tendency of natural selection would lie in the direction of their steady diminution through the coming ages. The brain alone remained a cardinal necessity. Only one other part of the body had a strong case for survival, and that was the hand, "teacher and agent of the brain." While ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... 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 enough ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... here, too, the male was smaller than the female. Being seized and slain and devoured by his lady love even in the very transports of husbandly affection, it had been bitten in on his subconscious sensibilities that diminutiveness was life-saving, and natural selection had made him inferior in size to his cannibal mate. He had a very shrinking attitude in her presence, as Socrates must have affected ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... material to supply its own waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecular movements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. This last stage having been reached, either by man's contrivance or as an unforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection must drive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before have begun to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy characters in fable who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being obliged to supply them with work, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... Smith one day and, for the first time, there was a peevish note in his voice, "that 'natural selection' theory of yours, Ralph, seems to have worked out to some extent—but not enough. We seem to be comfortably divided, all ten of us, into happy couples, but hanged if I'm strong ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... assure preadaptation and form a finality.[38] Their importance cannot be exaggerated. Thanks to his power of preadaptation, the being endowed with intelligence acquires an enormous advantage over everything which does not reason. No doubt, as has been shrewdly remarked, natural selection resembles a finality, for it ends in an adaptation of beings to their surroundings. There is therefore, strictly speaking, such a thing as finality without intelligence. But the adaptation resulting therefrom is a crude one, and proceeds by the elimination ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... 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 ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sensibly, that any 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. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... one of those little dogged minds that are incapable of receiving new impressions. Was it not evident in the way she stuck to Evan after I had once brought them together? I am not at all astonished that Mr. Raikes should have married her maid. It is a case of natural selection. But it is amusing to think of him carrying on the old business in 193, and with credit! I suppose his parents are to be pitied; but what better is the creature fit for? Mama displeases me in consenting to act as housekeeper to old Grumpus. I do not object to the fact, for it is prospective; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
