The Primary Factors of Organic Evolution

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Open Court Publishing Company, 1896 - 547 pages
 

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Page 4 - Several writers have misapprehended or objected to the term Natural Selection, Some have even imagined that natural selection induces variability, whereas it' implies only the. preservation of such variations as arise and are beneficial to the being under its conditions of * life.
Page 498 - ... The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working, as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes....
Page 180 - ... show reversional tendencies due to old age ; so that nearly every stage passed through by the higher genera has a fixed representative in a lower genus. Moreover, the lower genera are not merely equivalent to, or in exact parallelism with the early stages of the higher, but they express a permanent type of structure, as far as these genera are concerned, and after reaching maturity do not show a tendency to attain higher phases of development, but thicken the shell and cardinal process, absorb...
Page 4 - But if variations useful to any organic being ever do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance, these will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, or the survival of the fittest, I have called Natural Selection.
Page 249 - I mean by this expression that the whole organisation is so tied together during its growth and development, that when slight variations in any one part occur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified.
Page 462 - For peculiar habits confined to the workers or sterile females, however long they might be followed, could not possibly affect the males and fertile females, which alone leave descendants. I am surprised that no one has hitherto advanced this demonstrative case of neuter insects, against the well-known doctrine of inherited habit, as advanced by Lamarck.
Page 4 - ... a severe struggle for life at some age, season, or year, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of life, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits...
Page 4 - Nevertheless, low and simple forms will long endure if well fitted for their simple conditions of life. Natural selection, on the principle of qualities being inherited at corresponding ages, can modify the egg, seed, or young, as easily as the adult. Amongst many animals, sexual selection will have given its aid to ordinary selection, by assuring to the most vigorous and best adapted males the greatest...

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