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CHAPTER VI. VARIATIONS IN ANIMALS IF you were to speak to some uneducated man of the doctrine of Evolution for the first time, he would probably laugh with all the vigour of ignorant infallibility. Tell him that all the animals he sees daily may have come from one simpler form of life, and he thinks you are only making sport of his verdant ignorance. This is not altogether due to the mere fact that he does not understand the first principles of Evolution, or to the novelty of the explanation
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CHAPTER X. FACTS WHICH ONLY EVOLUTION CAN EXPLAIN IN this chapter I must depart from a strictly scientific examination, and state the case from a more aggressive point of view. As I have considered some of the chief difficulties in the way of accepting the doctrine of Evolution and of Natural Selection, it is only right to point out the difficulties by which we are met if we do not accept this doctrine. To do so it will be necessary to cover again some of the ground over which we have already
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time, the outer part had powers in which the inner portion had no share. It had developed that most marvellous property called irritability, upon which all intelligence and all possibility of education depend. So that once more to the Evolutionist there is no dark mystery either in the power of intelligence or in the origin of that power. But without Evolution it is a miracle of mystery. Will the man who denies Evolution tell us why intelligence should depend, at least for its manifestation
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is eternity. 3. Substance is everywhere and always in uninterrupted movement and transformation; nowhere is there perfect repose and rigidity; yet the infinite quantity of matter and of eternally-changing force remains constant. 4, The universal movement of substance in space takes the form of an eternal cycle or of a periodical process of evolution. 5. The phases of the evolution consist in a periodic change of consistency, of which the first outcome is the primary division into mass and ether
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F1548.1
Book:
Darwin, Francis & Seward, A. C. eds. 1903. More letters of Charles Darwin. A record of his work in a series of hitherto unpublished letters. London: John Murray. Volume 1
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; but we feel strongly that a letter should as far as possible be treated as a whole. We have in fact allowed this principle to interfere with an accurate classification, so that the reader will find, for instance, in the chapters on Evolution, questions considered which might equally well have come under Geographical Distribution or Geology, or questions in the chapter on Man which might have been placed under the heading Evolution. In the same way, to avoid mutilation, we have allowed
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am not able to furnish one-tenth of the facts on which the doctrine of Evolution is based. As for the words, I have explained all those of a special character which I have been compelled to use. If the student who may still have some doubts as to the meanings will care folly read three or four chapters aided by a dictionary, he will soon find his difficulties disappear. Thanks are due to several firms of publishers, including Messrs. Macmillan Co., Messrs. Kegan Paul Co., Messrs, Longmans
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CHAPTER XII. HOW IS ORGANIC EVOLUTION CAUSED? HERE it is especially necessary to repeat earnestly the warning that we must begin with the lowest forms of life and the surrounding forces of the universe if we are to understand the doctrine of Evolution. Many attempts have been made to define life, and, perhaps, none are completely successful; but it is generally admitted that Mr. Spencer has enriched thought and the scientific literature of the world by his definition of life. He says
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their places in relation to slight changes in their conditions. The foregoing objections hinge on the question whether we really know how old the world is, and at what period the various forms first appeared; and this may well be disputed (page 307). According to Evolution, there is no break in the chain of life. Everything has come from something else. Evolution shows that all living things form one family, that the earth itself is but a small child of the large family of planets and stars, and
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lies around you and beneath your feet. One way of learning the doctrine of Evolution is to become familiar with the present living forms, note their likenesses and their affinities; then excavate the solid rocks, and, as you turn over their pages of stone, see how the families of life have evolved from that rude and savage ancestry which is still all too strong in us. When baldly stated, many refuse to believe the doctrine of Evolution; but, properly speaking, belief has nothing to do with this
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transparent skin, furnished with a nerve and lined with pigment, but destitute of any other apparatus. Now, it is a wonderfully significant fact that, on the high authority of Virchow, the beautiful crystalline lens of man is formed in the embryo by an accumulation of epidermic cells, lying in a sack-like fold of the skin. Those who think there is any difficulty in the evolution of the eye should ponder this fact, and explain these few cells in a sack by some other means than evolution. There is
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principles of Evolution. No Evolutionist supposes that man has come from any species of existing monkeys. He merely says that the apes and man must somewhere have had a common ancestor. But there is nothing startling in this statement compared with many other statements which pass unchallenged by the objector. Man and fish had, then, a common ancestor; man and the oyster had a common ancestor; nay, man and the thistle had a common ancestor. For all forms of living things, animal and vegetable
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life in obedience to those laws. This would give us a true Sociology. Psychology can only be understood when based on Evolution. Only by a knowledge of the lower organisms and by tracing intelligence to its first manifestation can we hope to understand the working of the human brain. The old psychologies are bags of wind anchored to a few assumptions, not one of which can be shown to represent a real existence. And until we have a sound, workable psychology, we look in vain for any great
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F1548.1
Book:
Darwin, Francis & Seward, A. C. eds. 1903. More letters of Charles Darwin. A record of his work in a series of hitherto unpublished letters. London: John Murray. Volume 1
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passage of the Origin, he goes on, I have omitted two sentences...describing briefly the hypothesis of 'the origin of species by Natural Selection,' because I have always felt that this hypothesis does not contain the true theory of evolution, if evolution there has been in biology (the italics are not in the original). Lord Kelvin then describes as a most valuable and instructive criticism, Sir John Herschel's remark that the doctrine of Natural Selection is too like the Laputan method of
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; the change from a concentrated perceptible state is an absorption of motion and concomitant disintegration of matter. These are truisms. These two opposite processes, taken together, give us the history of every sensible existence, for everything is in progress either towards integration or disintegration. Evolution is the integration of matter and the dissipation of motion. Dissolution is the absorption of motion and the disintegration of matter. Now, the total history of every sensible
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Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation. I hope I have said enough to make clear this all-embracing law. But as Mr. Spencer is not easy to translate into brief, popular language, I will give a summary of Professor Haeckel's chapter on the evolution of the world from his
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and motion which constitute evolution, structural and functional, imply motions in the units that are re-distributed, we shall see a probable meaning in the fact that organic bodies, which exhibit the phenomena of evolution in so high a degree, are mainly composed of ultimate units having extreme mobility. The properties of substances, though destroyed to sense by combination, are not destroyed in reality; it follows from the persistence of force that the properties of a compound are resultants
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affirmation of universal evolution is in itself the negation of an 'absolute commencement' of anything. Every kind of being is conceived as a product of modifications, either of a pre-existing being or of pre-existing inorganic compounds. That organic matter was not produced all at once, but was reached through steps, we are well warranted in believing by the experiences of chemists. Organic matters are produced in the laboratory by what we may literally call artificial evolution. Chemists
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the same thing, with this important addition: It seems, therefore, likely enough that the first protoplasm fed upon these antecedent steps in its own evolution, just as animals feed on organic compounds at the present day. Professor Pearson continues: These words suffice to indicate the long ages of development that probably lie behind protoplasm as we know it. Let us for a moment consider that there is possibly as long an evolution from the chemical substance to the protoplasm we now know as
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Perhaps a stronger agreement on any scientific point could not be found than this, which proclaims that the only reasonable account of living things is that by chemical and physical laws they have originated from those atoms which form inorganic matter. Mr. J. Arthur Thomson, in his book, The Science of Life (pub. 1899), says: In his presidential address to the British Association, 1870, Huxley expressed his opinion that, if he could have been a witness of the beginning of organic evolution
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Falconer, 116 Force and chemical action, 185, 186 Foster, Sir Michael, 226 GEDDES and Thomson, on sex, 163 Gegenbaur, 55 Geology, the layers of rocks, 188 Gorilla, 68 Gray, Asa, 135 HAECKEL, Ernst, What is man? 48 and following Haeckel's conclusions on the evolution of the world, 194 Hair, 39 Helmholtz, 223 Hensen, 156 Hepburn, Dr., 83 Horse, evolution of, 12 Humble bees and clover, 119 Hutton, 228 Huxley, on the horse, 13 on hybridism, 164, 165 on development, 46 IMPERFECT geological record
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