Quotes from Charles Darwin

Hoe al die absurde gedragsregels en al die absurde geloofsovertuigingen ontstaan zijn weten we niet; ...: maar het is opvallend hoe een geloof dat in de vroege levensjaren voortdurend werd ingeprent, als het brein nog ontvankelijk is, welhaast de status van instinct verwerft; en de essentie van een instinct is dat het wordt gevolgd, zelfs tegen de ratio in.

the power to charm the female has sometimes been more important than the power to conquer other males in battle. LAWS

I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

Natural selection acts only by the preservation and accumulation of small inherited modifications, each profitable to the preserved being; and as modern geology has almost banished such views as the excavation of a great valley by a single diluvial wave, so will natural selection banish the belief of the continued creation of new organic beings, or of any great and sudden modification in their structure.

And thus, the forms of life throughout the universe become divided into groups subordinate to groups.

É muito fácil esconder nossa ignorância debaixo de expressões como plano de criação, unidade de padrão, etc., e pensar que explicamos um fato apenas por reafirmá-lo.

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence

They also carried on commerce with other nations. All this clearly shows, as Heer has remarked, that they had at this early age progressed considerably in civilisation; and this again implies a long continued previous period of less advanced civilisation, during which the domesticated animals, kept by different tribes in different districts, might have varied and given rise to distinct races.

A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.

He who believes that each being has been created as we now see it, must occasionally have felt surprise when he has met with an animal having habits and structure not at all in agreement.

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

Showing that they descend from common parents, and consequently must be ranked as varieties.

When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

interpositions

I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.

Nevertheless it is probable that the hearing rather early in life such views maintained and praised may have favoured my upholding them under a different form in my 'Origin of Species.

the structure of every organic being is related, in the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all the other organic beings ...

It has already been stated that various parts in the same individual, which are exactly alike during an early embryonic period, become widely different and serve for widely different purposes in the adult state. So again it has been shown that generally the embryos of the most distinct species belonging to the same class are closely similar, but become, when fully developed, widely dissimilar.

I find I look at this province with very different eyes then when I arrived. I recollect I then thought of it as singularly level, but now after galloping over the montañas my own only surprise is what could have induced me to have ever called it level!

El aislamiento también es un elemento importante en la modificación de las especies por medio de la selección natural. En un área limitada o aislada, si no es muy grande, serán generalmente casi uniformes las condiciones orgánicas e inorgánicas de la vida, de modo que la selección natural tenderá a modificar de la misma manera a todos los individuos que varíen en la misma especie.

It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the plan of creation, unity of design

One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges...

What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!