"Natural selection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... frequent 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 ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... 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
... flood beneath them. Behind, and far transcending, the particular causes of this and that development lies the operation of great biological laws, selecting a type for survival, transforming the mind and body of men slowly but surely. Whether due to the natural selection of circumstance, or to the inward urge of vital force, there seems to be no doubt that the average intellect, not of leading thinkers or of select groups, {13} but of the European races as a whole, has ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... ringing himself. Consequently Field, the father of the camp, made a gallant attempt at the work, only to miss the "bell" with his hammer and strike himself on the knee, after which he limped to a seat, declaring they didn't need a bell-ringing anyhow. Upon the blacksmith the duty devolved by natural selection. ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... "The evolution of man by Natural Selection draws near its close, to be followed by ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... spiritually, who was not a man physically. It was a delight to her and a joy to look upon the strong males of her kind, with bodies comely in the sight of God and muscles swelling with the promise of deeds and work. Man, to her, was preeminently a fighter. She believed in natural selection and in sexual selection, and was certain that if man had thereby become possessed of faculties and functions, they were for him to use and could but tend to his good. And likewise with instincts. If she felt drawn to any person or thing, it was good for her to be ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... pemmican—a mass of facts crushed and pounded into shape, rather than held together by the ordinary medium of a logical bond." The impossibility of a scientific test is admitted, for vast periods of time in the infinite past are claimed for the work of natural selection. Countless ages form the basis of the system, without which it could not have brought about the present order of things. But an infinite series of life forms upon our earth could not be possible, for it has been shown, allowing that the heat has passed out of our earth uniformly, ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880
... end. I detest folly; I detest still more (if I must be frank, dear Arthur) mere cleverness. Mankind has simply become a tailless host of uninstinctive animals. We should never have taken to Evolution, Mr. Withers. 'Natural Selection!'—little gods and fishes!—the deaf for the dumb. We should have used our brains—intellectual pride, the ecclesiastics call it. And by brains I mean—what do I mean, Alice?—I mean, my dear child," and she laid two gross fingers on Alice's narrow sleeve. "I mean courage. ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... been stated, is not the doctrine of evolution; it is, however, a successful attempt to explain the law or manner of evolution. The law of natural selection, pointed out by Darwin, is called by Herbert Spencer, The struggle for existence. Darwin discovered that natural selection produces fitness between organisms and their circumstances, which explains the law of the ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... beings, it is their thoughts that identify them as life form or disaster. Mountain or volcano. In the city everyone radiates suspicion and death. They enjoy killing, thinking about killing, and planning for killing. This is natural selection, too, you realize. These are the survival traits that work best in the city. Outside the city men think differently. If they are threatened individually, they fight, as will any other creature. Under more general survival threats they co-operate ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... comfortable blasphemies, scientific or other; natural selection or the inscrutable decrees of God. Whereas this was manifestly a Hobson's selection, most unnatural and forced, to choose want of all that makes life sweet and dear; to choose gaunt babes, with pinched and ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... 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" ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... it may be truly said that, as regarded deducing man and all things from a prima materia or protoplasm by means of natural selection and vast study of differentiation, they were exactly where Darwin, and Wallace, and Huxley were when we began to know the latter. I do not agree with Max Muller in his very German and very artfully disguised and defended ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... quite pleasantly, by virtue of "natural selection," and has accompanied me thus far in our "struggle for life," and he, and the S. Q. N., and the Duchess, and the Maid, returned that day to Crieff, and were friends all our days. I was a little timid when he was crossing a burn lest ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... Where 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 of ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... are innumerable in natural history, that Weismann relies to repudiate absolutely the heredity of characters acquired by non-germinal organs and to attribute the development of organisms to blends and combinations due to conjugation, or crossing, as well as to natural selection, which he regards as all-powerful. Darwin well recognized the difficulty in question, and being unable to explain the facts, had recourse to the hypothesis of pangenesis, that is of small particles detached from all parts of the body ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... convertibility; the extension of mechanism to the vital processes, favored even by Lotze; the renewed conflict between atomism and dynamism; further, the Darwinian theory[1] (1859), which makes organic species develop from one another by natural selection in the struggle for existence (through inheritance and adaptation); finally, the meta-geometrical speculations[2] of Gauss (1828), Riemann (On the Hypotheses which lie at the Basis of Geometry, 1854, published in 1867), Helmholtz ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... carefully fed, and used the lomi-lomi constantly. It is supposable, too, that in the wars which prevailed among the tribes the weaklings, if any such were among the chiefs, were pretty sure to be killed off; and thus a natural selection went on which weeded out the small ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... 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 ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... contempt and hatred of white men for yellow, red, brown, and black men has worked all over earth, is working yet, and will work for ages. It is a motive of that tremendous tragedy which Spencer has entitled "the survival of the fittest," and Darwin, "natural selection." ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... then be a mistake to invoke against socialism the Darwinian law of Natural Selection in the form under which that law manifests itself in the primitive (or lower) forms of life, without taking into account its continuous attenuation as we pass from vegetables to animals, from animals to men, ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... these words, which have not been written in haste; and I entreat you also, if you wish to see how little the new theory, that species may have been gradually created by variation, natural selection, and so forth, interferes with the old theory of design, contrivance, and adaptation, nay, with the fullest admission of benevolent final causes—I entreat you, I say, to study Darwin's "Fertilisation of Orchids"—a book which (whether his main theory be true or ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... the requirements of satisfied nationalities. The old men said the marriage system had given them more trouble than anything else, and they finally abandoned all laws to the laws of nature. The young people were allowed to mate by natural selection, and if they were not ...
— Building a State in Apache Land • Charles D. Poston
... to which we point, and of which the present work of Mr. Darwin is but the preliminary outline, may be stated in his own language as follows:—"Species originated by means of natural selection, or through the preservation of the favoured races in the struggle for life." To render this thesis intelligible, it is necessary to interpret its terms. In the first place, what is a species? The question is a simple one, but the right answer to it is hard to ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... all but a handful of her colonists working the vast gold mines of Central Africa. From these and their degraded slaves and a later intermixture of the blood of the anthropoids sprung the gnarled men of Opar; but by some queer freak of fate, aided by natural selection, the old Atlantean strain had remained pure and undegraded in the females descended from a single princess of the royal house of Atlantis who had been in Opar at the time of the great catastrophe. Such ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, is one of the processes by which evolution takes place. According to this law, only the fittest survive in the struggle for life. Darwin was led to this discovery on reading Malthus's thesis regarding the disproportion between the rates of increase in population ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... not a curious, yet a comprehensible circumstance, that the tastes which thus show themselves in the development, by natural selection, of lovely flowers, should also show themselves in the marked preference for beautiful mates? Poised on yonder sprig of harebell stands a little purple-winged butterfly, one of the most exquisite among our British kinds. That little butterfly owes its own rich and delicately shaded tints ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... friend," he 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
... 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 is indicated the view that ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... the worship of Deity they separate women from men. But all oscillations are equalized by swingings to the other side. The Quakers have often discarded a distinctive marriage-ceremony, thus slanting toward natural selection. And I might tell you of how in one of the South American States there is a band of Friends who have discarded the rite entirely, making marriage a private and personal contract between the man and the woman—a sacred matter of conscience; ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... the Church. What intelligent acquaintance with Darwin's speculations would the world in general have made, except for two or three happy and comprehensive terms, as 'the survival of the fittest,' 'the struggle for existence,' 'the process of natural selection'? Multitudes who else would have known nothing about Comte's system, know something about it when they know that he called it 'the ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... accused of putting words in the place of things. It seems to be true, that whether applied to language or to other branches of knowledge, the Darwinian theory, unless very precisely defined, hardly escapes from being a truism. If by 'the natural selection' of words or meanings of words or by the 'persistence and survival of the fittest' the maintainer of the theory intends to affirm nothing more than this—that the word 'fittest to survive' survives, he adds ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... 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, reason, self-consciousness, ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... his own presence in the impulse to escape. The silence which one might imagine to be reassuring 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 that ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... panel, we see their children, now grown, finding themselves, with Natural Selection. The man in the center, splendid in physical and intellectual perfection, attracts the women on either hand, while two other men, deserted for this finer type, display anger and despair. One tries to hold the woman by force, the other, unable ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... profitable to some part of their economy. Such individuals will have a better chance of surviving, and of propagating their new and slightly different structure; and the modification may be slowly increased by the accumulative action of natural selection to any profitable extent. The variety thus formed will either coexist with, or, more commonly, will exterminate its parent form. An organic being, like the woodpecker or misseltoe, may thus come to be adapted to a score of contingences—natural selection ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... invariable fratricidal war which followed the demise of the Crown gave rise to a natural selection (to borrow a term from modern physical science), which eventually confirmed the strongest in possession of the prize. However humanity may revolt from the scenes of crime which such a system must perforce entail, yet it ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... towards sexual intercourse underwent a change as soon as here and there individuals appeared who were conscious of their individuality. Natural selection could not come into play in a community the members of which resembled one another so closely that all personal characteristics were obliterated in a general monotony. One woman was as good as another, ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... wiser councils have prevailed. The cultivator deals directly with the government; has a lease as it were subject to revaluation every thirty years. In time the poor cultivator will no doubt rise to the advantages of this system by a process of natural selection. It was certain that many unfit occupiers would be found, and this has been the case so far. The plan is bound, however, to develop and sustain the most competent, and this means that it is the right plan. The land yields the government twenty-two millions sterling per annum ($110,000,000). ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... advanced in civilization. Whether the peasant population would equal in average intelligence a band of North American Indians or a tribe of native New Zealanders is very doubtful, for in such peoples natural selection for intelligence was undoubtedly severe because of their intense struggle with nature and with other tribes, unaided by the accumulated knowledge and tools of civilized communities. Among such peoples greater demands were probably made ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... if 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 wisdom ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... mostly middle-aged, or advanced in years. They were generally large men, with finely developed brows—natural selection had brought the great heads to the top of affairs. Some were cleancut in feature, looking merely like successful business men; others, like the Prince, showed signs of sensuality and dissipation, in the baggy, haggard features. They were unquestionably ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... them as they walked in their steady, stately young life among the ancient cedars and clipped yews of the garden, with the rags and tatters of the ruined summer hanging over and around them, they must have looked as fine an instance of natural selection as the world had to show. And now in truth for the first time, with any shadow of purpose, that is, did the thought of Helen as a wife occur to Bascombe. She listened so well, was so ready to take what he presented to her, was evidently so willing to become a pupil, that he ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... Garden of Eden. But if big things like us didnt die, we'd crowd one another off the face of the globe. Nothing survived, sir, except the sort of people that had the sense and good manners to die and make room for the fresh supplies. And so death was introduced by Natural Selection. You get it out of your head, my lad, that I'm going to die because I'm wearing out or decaying. Theres no such thing as decay to a vital man. I shall clear out; but I ...
— Misalliance • George Bernard Shaw
... "process of selection out of an infinity of possible elements solely on the grounds of utility." Thus the cause for our horror of incest is hidden away in our subliminal consciousness; yet we cannot but think, with Westermarck, that this instinct is but the result of natural selection,[102] the utility of the factor or factors occasioning it being no longer in evidence or required. Again, at certain seasons, man is seized with waldliebe (forest-love) and longs to flee from the haunts of men, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... on without ceasing, 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 ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... the mimicked form is unpalatable or has an odour repulsive to birds and lizards. It must, of course, be understood that the mimicry is unconscious, the result, as in the cases of cryptic resemblance, having been brought about by natural selection—the less perfect the mimicry the more liable are the individuals to be attacked, and the less chance have they of ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... 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} ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... 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
... favorable to survival, Darwin argued, would secure the survival, through the passing on of these variations by heredity of the better adapted types of plants and animals. The natural process of weeding out the inferior or least adapted through early death, or through failure to reproduce, Darwin called "natural selection", and likened it in its effect upon organisms to the artificial selection which breeders consciously use to secure types of plants or animals that they desire. The only great addition to Darwin's theories which has been made since he wrote ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... flower-peduncles from the young internodes, and sensitiveness from the young petioles. But to whatever cause these capacities are due, the case is interesting; for, by a little increase in power through natural selection, they might easily have been rendered as useful to the plant in climbing, as are the flower-peduncles (hereafter to be described) of ...
— The Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants • Charles Darwin
... Hermes, dividing these figures from the next group, allows for a space of time to elapse, and we come to their children, now grown to manhood and womanhood, in their rude strength finding themselves, with the result of Natural Selection. This is a group of five personages, the center figure a man of splendid youth and vigor, suggesting the high state both of physical and intellectual perfection, unconsciously attracting the female, two of whom ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... 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, found too much of everything done in too short a time. ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... hiding her hurt from all human eyes. I knew how her fierce pride was bearing up under the cruelty of it. I felt how she had rushed from the humiliation one man had brought her to the waiting love of the one who should have been her first choice by the divine right of natural selection. This strong man had loved her for years, but he would never allow her to imperil either his dignity or her own. He was just the man her impulsive, high-strung nature could accept as a refuge, beat against and buffet if need be, then learn ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... proceedings of the spinsters, and chiefly, perhaps, from a consciousness of good clothes. The married men stood grouped in corners and talked of their every-day affairs. The young people clustered together in little knots, governed more or less by natural selection— only the veterans of several seasons pairing off into the discreet retirement of stairs and hall angles. At the further end of the long drawing-room, Farnham's eyes at last lighted upon the object of his quest. Alice sat in the ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... 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." Again: "At one time all the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... pinch closer than the common, they cry, "Catch me here again!" and sure enough you catch them there again—perhaps before the week is out. It is as old as "Robinson Crusoe"; as old as man. Our race has not been strained for all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call Natural Selection, to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety; the voices of its fathers call it forth. Already in our society as it exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living; he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of any vicissitude but one of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... law, and law only. Even 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 an order which is just as much above God's knowledge as above ours. Now, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... 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 for this ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... By natural selection, Miss Dix was appointed Superintendent of Women Nurses in the federal service, by order of the Secretary of War. In this capacity she served through the four years' struggle. In a letter dated December 7, 1864, she writes: "I take no hour's leisure. I think that since the war, ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... contributed to various periodicals, or read before scientific societies during the last fifteen years, with others now printed for the first time. The two first of the series are printed without alteration, because, having gained me the reputation of being an independent originator of the theory of "natural selection," they may be considered to have some historical value. I have added to them one or two very short explanatory notes, and have given headings to subjects, to make them uniform with the rest of the book. The other essays have been carefully ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... commit "the happy despatch," a la Japonaise. All this may be true, but I hold that language is meant to be an instrument of communication, and that in the struggle for life, the most efficient instrument of communication must certainly carry the day, as long as natural selection, or, as we formerly called it, reason, rules ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... 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
... changes are: Reduction of hair and teeth, and of hand skill; and dulling of the senses of sight, smell and hearing upon which active creatures depend so largely for safety. That sort of charity which fosters the physically, mentally and morally feeble, and is thus contrary to the law of natural selection, must also, in the long run, have an adverse effect upon the race." Too bad that Christian charity takes care of the feeble, endangering evolution, and the doctrine that the weak have no rights that the strong are bound to respect! We are not surprised that Nietzsche, whose insane philosophy ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... 'Bees and Wasps,' with a few minor details relating to Ants, by Sir John Lubbock, in the International Scientific Series. She was not, indeed quite so timid about her reputation as the ant, and even volunteered to give her visitor an account of the formation of hexagonal cells by Natural Selection, culled from the pages of the 'Origin of Species'; but she observed that, though her brain might be smaller in proportion than the brains of some inferior insects, it was of finer quality, what there was of it, and that fairies were merely an outgrowth of the anthropomorphic ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... Doesn't it show The value of 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 day Are short and fat. Isn't that funny, ...
— Rada - A Drama of War in One Act • Alfred Noyes
... organism. The true polity is only in slow formation; for, obviously, human reason is not yet a complete development. As yet, men come to the front by accident; some day they will be advanced to power by an inevitable and impeccable process of natural selection. For my own part"—he turned slightly towards the hostess—"I think that use will be made of our existing system of aristocracy; in not a few instances, technical aristocracy is justified by natural pre-eminence. We can all think of examples. Personally, I might mention my friend Lord ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... driven to make the admission that, however much people may dispute about individual questions, though volume after volume may be written, and thousands of observations accumulated about the struggle for existence and its insignificance, about the omnipotence or powerlessness of natural selection, natural science itself is moving in a direction which, within certain limits, must find ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... 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, should ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... objectively," Douglas said. "We're trying to select the best physical type we can in the hope that he'll pass his qualities to his offspring, and there's no better practical way to select the strongest and hardiest than by natural selection. We control their environment as little as possible and let Nature do our educating until they're old ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... 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 ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... immense consolation because it 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. In this consolation we seemed ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... there seemed not even the remotest trace of vegetation upon the rocks; and indeed the poor things looked as if with them existence were truly "a struggle," out of which little could be gained by natural selection. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... make in that under any REGIME. The luxuries of the few are a drop in the bucket—the crowd now has all there is. The difference between private and public ownership, it seems to me, is mainly in the natural selection of those most competent to foresee the future and to direct labor into the most productive channels, and the greater poignancy of the illusion of self-seeking under which the private owner works. The real problem, under ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... in society, just like the life of other species, is a struggle for existence, and therefore it is a process of selective adaptation. The evolution of social structure has been a process of natural selection of institutions. The progress which has been and is being made in human institutions and in human character may be set down, broadly, to a natural selection of the fittest habits of thought and to a process of enforced adaptation of individuals to ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... brought him different and keener perceptions, that explanation was entirely inadequate. He wanted a quality beyond his experience, beyond, he realized, any material condition—Susan Brundon, yes; but it was no comparatively simple urge of sex, the natural selection of the general animal creation. There was no question of passionate importunities; those, here, would be worse than futile; all that he desired was beyond words, moving in obedience to a principle of which he had not caught the slightest glimpse. Yet, confident ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... succeeding paragraph, Lyell very remarkably foreshadows Darwin's "natural selection" and "struggle for existence." He speaks of a species being rendered more prolific in order to perpetuate its existence; "but this would perhaps make it press too hard upon other species at other times. Now if it be an insect it may be made in one of its transformations to ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... in non-Christian India, ecclesiastical authority or tradition and the system of Christian doctrine as such, possess no force. By illustrations from other spheres, let us make clear what is meant by such dynamical elements of Christianity. The doctrine of the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection was put before the world by Darwin in 1859, and within the half century has been accepted almost as an axiom by the whole civilised world. Undoubtedly that doctrine has proved itself dynamical. On the other hand, ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... resembling that of 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 effect of their ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... "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
... Clearly there was no weight-control here, for the figures varied from extreme slenderness to waddling fatness. The most common type was that of mild obesity which men call "plumpness," a quality so prized since the world began that the women of all races by natural selection ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... madam," screamed Raby, "but, d—m it, the little rascal's a scientist,—an atheist, a radical, a scoffer! Disbelieves in the Bible, ma'am; is full of this Darwinian stuff about natural selection and descent. Descent, forsooth! In my day, madam, gentlemen were content to trace their ancestors back to gentlemen, and ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... 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 ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... Herbert's: he explains it all on biological grounds as the beautiful discriminative action of natural selection. Simple, but not consolatory. Still, look at the other side of the question. Suppose you and everybody else were to give up all superfluities, and confine all your energies to the unlimited production ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... but also painters and novelists and men and women of varied distinction. The city palpitates with life and ambition and hope and promise; it attracts the great and the successful, and those who admire greatness and success. The force of natural selection is at work here as everywhere; and it is rapidly concentrating in our small island whatever is finest, most progressive, and best ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... 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 engendered in ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... general aim of the present abstract being thus understood, I shall start at the beginning of my subject by very briefly describing the theory of natural selection. It is a matter of observable fact that all plants and animals are perpetually engaged in what Mr. Darwin calls a "struggle for existence." That is to say, in every generation of every species a great ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... savage from the beast. So we are accustomed to argue, but we must make a singular reservation. The lowest peoples of the human family, which seem to represent primitive man, do not wage war, and are little addicted to violence. They seem by some process of natural selection to have obtained the social quality of peacefulness and mutual aid. There was, in a sense, a stage of primitive innocence. As, however, these primitive peoples grew in numbers and were organised in tribes, as they obtained collective possessions—flocks and pastures and hunting grounds—they ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... queer sort of natural selection, its people had congregated into life communities not all of one pattern. There were places as early as the beginning of the century where distinction had appeared. At other places life was as rude and rough as could be imagined. There were ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... time immemorial, the strongest man has become chieftain through sheer natural selection. Societies which have been upheaved to their roots by anarchy, panic, or any of these more perfervid emotions, revert to the primitive state. On this Portuguese ship, authority was smashed into the smallest atoms, and every man became a savage and was in danger ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... old well established companies, since their superintendents and assistants have grown up with the business, and have been gradually worked into and fitted for their especial duties through years of training and the process of natural selection. Even in these establishments, however, this difficulty has impressed itself upon the managers so forcibly that most of them have of late years spent thousands of dollars in re-grouping their machine tools for the purpose ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... 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. ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... two conditions. The first is that there shall be marked changes in the environment so that the process of natural selection has full opportunity to do its work. The second is that numerous new forms or mutants, as the biologists call them, shall be produced. Both of these conditions are most fully met in large continents in the temperate ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... masterpiece, 'Physics 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 debt to all scientific and institutional research, that it remains ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... seventy thousand loyal recruits from Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland, and Virginia, may even have proved the deciding factor in turning the tide of events. The nation's leader for the struggle seems to have been secured through a process of natural selection as had been the case a century earlier with Washington. We may recall that Washington died but ten years before Lincoln was born; and from the fact that each leader was at hand when the demand came for his service, and when without such service the nation might have been ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... political aspects of a process of social selection which has dominated one civilization after another. At the present moment it has reached a critical stage in the West. We apply the term "social selection" to the result of this process because there is a parallel between the natural selection of the biologists and the social selection which sociologists observe in the rapid and extensive changes presently taking place in ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... 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 ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... made usually in the late spring to reach the railroad in the fall. The drive is as orderly as the march of an army. By natural selection the leaders of the cattle take the head of the herd. They are especially fitted for the place. The same ones are found in the front every day, and the others fall into position, so that throughout the drive the cattle occupy the same relative ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... butcher, Gauguin a farceur, Van Gogh a particularly disagreeable lunatic: that is what the critics said, and the public said "Hee-haw." They reminded one of a pack of Victorian curates to whom the theory of natural selection had been too suddenly broken. Two years later Roger Fry and I collected and arranged at the Grafton Galleries an exhibition of contemporary French art—Matisse, Picasso, Maillol, etc. Every one abroad had recognized these men as interesting artists of varying merit; no one doubted ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... minute, to twirl our hands and do nothing. None of us ever wants to be married,—that's settled; but we do want to be useful. We're a united group of the closest kind of friends, bound by the ties of—of—natural selection, and we need a purpose in life. Gertrude's a real artist, but the rest ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... 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 in different islands ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... grounds. As for us theologians, who are we, that we should limit, priori, the power of God? 'Is anything too hard for the Lord?' asked the prophet of old; and we have a right to ask it as long as the world shall last. If it be said that 'natural selection,' or, as Mr. Herbert Spencer better defines it, the 'survival of the fittest,' is too simple a cause to produce such fantastic variety - that, again, is a question to be settled exclusively by men of science, ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... rye, others wheat, others millet, others rice. Some places supported cows, others goats, others had few on no domesticated animals. Some places produced a lot of fruits and vegetables. Others, did not. Whatever the local dietary, during thousands of years of eating that dietary natural selection prevailed; most babies that were allergic to or not able to thrive on the available dietary, died quickly. Probably of childhood bacterial infections. The result of this weeding out process was a population closely adapted to the available dietary ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... or of the hand in painting, might have merely physical causes. If consciousness is thus accessory to life and not essential to it, the race of man might have existed upon the earth and acquired all the arts necessary for its subsistence without possessing a single sensation, idea, or emotion. Natural selection might have secured the survival of those automata which made useful reactions upon their environment. An instinct of self-preservation would have been developed, dangers would have been shunned without being feared, and injuries revenged without ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... 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
... 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)
... theories of evolution and methods of investigation. 1 The theory of descent and of natural selection. Evolution and adaptation. Elementary species and varieties. Methods of ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... opinions with much spirit. He had, moreover, a considerable sense of humour. What struck me most about Scott was the great acuteness of his powers of observing natural phenomena, and especially of such as had any bearing on variation, natural selection or hybridity. While most attentive to the ordinary duties of the chief of a large garden, Scott always continued to find leisure for private study, and especially for the conduct of experiments in hybridization. For the latter his position in the Calcutta ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... is co-extensive with organism. Sensation and Emotion are prominent marks of it. These are either pleasurable or painful; the latter diminish vital motions, the former increase them. This is a product of natural selection. A mis-reading of these facts is the fallacy of Buddhism and other pessimistic systems. Pleasure comes from continuous action. This is illustrated by the esthetic ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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
... sacred enthusiasm of a poet seeing the world grow brighter and intelligible to him, and who, at the age of twenty-five, demanded of it a method and introduced this into criticism and psychology in order to give these new life—the mechanical equivalent of heat, natural selection, spectroscopic analysis, the theory of the microbes, recent discoveries in physics and the constitution of matter, research into historic origins, psychological explanation of texts, extension of oriental researches, discoveries of prehistoric conditions, comparative study of barbaric communities—every ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... in recent years that Darwinism is dead, and there is a sense in which this is true. Unmodified and unassisted natural selection is not to-day considered by most scientists a sufficient agent for producing evolution. But everyone connected with the subject acknowledges Darwin as the master, and says that it was his work which converted the world to a belief in evolution. We can have no better preparation for an intelligent ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker |
