Charles Darwin Quotes About Adaptation
-
At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.
→ -
As natural selection acts by competition, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates; so that we need feel no surprise at the inhabitants of any one country, although on the ordinary view supposed to have been specially created and adapted for that country, being beaten and supplanted by the naturalised productions from another land.
→ -
The more I study nature, the more I become impressed with ever-increasing force with the conclusion, that the contrivances and beautiful adaptations slowly acquired through each part occasionally varying in a slight degree but in many ways, with the preservation or natural selection of those variations which are beneficial to the organism under the complex and ever-varying conditions of life, transcend in an incomparable degree the contrivances and adaptations which the most fertile imagination of man could suggest with unlimited time at his disposal.
→
Related Authors
-
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Science writer -
Sigmund Freud Neurologist -
Richard Dawkins Ethologist -
Albert Einstein Theoretical Physicist -
Charles Dickens Writer -
Salvador Dali Painter -
Alfred Russel Wallace Naturalist -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Gregor Mendel Scientist -
Nicolaus Copernicus Mathematician -
Carl Linnaeus Botanist -
Stephen Hawking Physicist -
Isaac Newton Physicist -
Galileo Galilei Physicist -
Abraham Lincoln 16th U.S. President -
Thomas A. Edison Inventor -
Charles Lyell Lawyer -
Louis Pasteur Chemist -
Aristotle Philosopher -
Herbert Spencer Philosopher