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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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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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attained to a clear idea of Natural Selection, and therefore his views may not have had, even to himself, the irresistible convincing power they afterwards gained; but that he was, in the ordinary sense of the word, convinced of the truth of the doctrine of evolution we cannot doubt. He thought it almost useless to try to prove the truth of evolution until the cause of change was discovered. And it is natural that in later life he should have felt that conviction was wanting till that cause was
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impossible. Why, they would fill all the shops in this street. But where are they? I ask. I want to see them. Where can I find them? Several of them you will not find, sir. There are none of them left. But why did you destroy them? Oh, it was not done that way, sir. When the improved one came out, nobody would have the old ones, so they disappeared, and were not only superseded, but forgotten. We call it the survival of the fittest. Now, here you have a sketch of Evolution. Mark, it has only taken
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earliest powers which must have marked any living thing. Next to sustaining itself, the power to reproduce itself is absolutely necessary, or the race would die out. If Evolution has taken place, here we ought to find some striking facts. We know that at first there was no such thing as sex. The lowest organisms multiply by dividing in half, or by budding, and thus form new creatures of their kind. If we might write quite plainly, the history and explanation of reproduction would of itself supply
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apparent respect from the ovules from which other animals grow. The embryo itself at a very early period cannot be distinguished from that of other members of the vertebrate kingdom (See Fig.7). Very wonderful is the evidence in favour of Evolution furnished by the development of man from the very beginning of his life before birth. Speaking broadly, man in his development goes through a series of changes that are the same, at different stages, as the fixed forms of the lower animals when they
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not stand alone, but fitted into a group, as other animals formed groups. In this he did more completely what Goethe and Linn us had vaguely suggested or partially accomplished. Then followed an army of men who by toil and thought led mankind into the light. In 1859 Darwin laid bare great laws of life in his Origin of Species, and Huxley and Gegenbaur (1864) applied the evolution theory to comparative anatomy, and by this means proved that man is a vertebrate animal in every respect. But
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