The Origin of Species

by

Charles Darwin

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Natural Selection and the Power of Nature Theme Icon
Reason, Argument, and the Scientific Method Theme Icon
Time and Progress Theme Icon
Collaboration and Science Theme Icon
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One of Darwin’s central ideas in The Origin of Species was that over time, organisms would become better adapted to their environment. As less well-adapted organisms die out and become extinct, the organisms that remain are better suited to compete for resources, often containing organs and body parts of remarkable complexity, like the skull or wings or eyes. While not all critics agreed, Darwin believed that even these very complex structures could arise in a species through a series of gradual, incremental improvements. For example, species with complex eyes today likely descended from species that originally had much simpler eyes, and it is possible to imagine intermediate species with eyes that improved on the original structure but still lacked the organization of the modern version. In some cases, an organ or feature might lose its original function, like the wings on an ostrich; yet this, too, is a type of progress because it allows the organism to grow and adapt in other ways (due to a principle called economy of growth). Also, adaptation is not necessarily a linear process, since changes in the environment, climate, and other species can all affect the conditions for survival. Nevertheless, Darwin argued in the book’s final chapter that due to natural selection, “all corporeal and natural endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.” Darwin’s personal opinions have been the subject of much speculation, but in The Origin of Species, at least, he makes the case that his scientific theories reveal a world that is in a constant state of progress and improvement.

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Time and Progress Quotes in The Origin of Species

Below you will find the important quotes in The Origin of Species related to the theme of Time and Progress.
Chapter 1 Quotes

When we compare the individuals of the same variety or sub-variety of our older cultivated plants and animals, one of the first points which strikes us is, that they generally differ more from each other than do the individuals of any one species or variety in a state of nature.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 9
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Chapter 3 Quotes

A struggle for existence inevitably follows from the high rate at which all organic beings tend to increase.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus
Page Number: 62
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Many cases are on record showing how complex and unexpected are the checks and relations between organic beings, which have to struggle together in the same country.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus
Page Number: 69
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Chapter 4 Quotes

As man can produce, and certainly has produced, a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not natural selection effect? Man can act only on external and visible characters: Nature, if I may be allowed to personify the natural preservation or survival of the fittest, cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they are useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 79
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This leads me to say a few words on what I have called sexual selection. This form of selection depends, not on a struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings or to external conditions, but on a struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex. The result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 84
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Chapter 5 Quotes

In one sense the conditions of life may be said, not only to cause variability, either directly or indirectly, but likewise to include natural selection, for the conditions determine whether this or that variety shall survive.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 130
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Chapter 6 Quotes

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Related Symbols: Eyes
Page Number: 172
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Chapter 7 Quotes

All Mr. Mivart’s objections will be, or have been, considered in the present volume. The one new point which appears to have struck many readers is, “That natural selection is incompetent to account for the incipient stages of useful structures.” This subject is intimately connected with that of the gradation of the characters, often accompanied by a change of function, for instance, the conversion of a swim-bladder into lungs, points which were discussed in the last chapter under two headings. Nevertheless, I will here consider in some detail several of the cases advanced by Mr. Mivart, selecting those which are the most illustrative, as want of space prevents me from considering all.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin (speaker), St. George Jackson Mivart
Page Number: 211
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Chapter 8 Quotes

It will be universally admitted that instincts are as important as corporeal structures for the welfare of each species, under its present conditions of life. Under changed conditions of life, it is at least possible that slight modifications of instinct might be profitable to a species; and if it can be shown that instincts do vary ever so little, then I can see no difficulty in natural selection preserving and continually accumulating variations of instinct to any extent that was profitable.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 245
Explanation and Analysis:

As natural selection acts only by the accumulation of slight modifications of structure or instinct, each profitable to the individual under its conditions of life, it may reasonably be asked, how a long and graduated succession of modified architectural instincts, all tending towards the present perfect plan of construction, could have profited the progenitors of the hive-bee? I think the answer is not difficult: cells constructed like those of the bee or the wasp gain in strength, and save much in labour and space, and in the materials of which they are constructed.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Related Symbols: Eyes
Page Number: 268
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Chapter 9 Quotes

The view commonly entertained by naturalists is that species, when intercrossed, have been specially endowed with sterility, in order to prevent their confusion. This view certainly seems at first highly probable, for species living together could hardly have been kept distinct had they been capable of freely crossing. The subject is in many ways important for us, more especially as the sterility of species when first crossed, and that of their hybrid offspring, cannot have been acquired, as I shall show, by the preservation of successive profitable degrees of sterility. It is an incidental result of differences in the reproductive systems of the parent-species.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 279
Explanation and Analysis:

First crosses between forms known to be varieties, or sufficiently alike to be considered as varieties, and their mongrel offspring, are very generally, but not, as is so often stated, invariably fertile. Nor is this almost universal and perfect fertility surprising, when it is remembered how liable we are to argue in a circle with respect to varieties in a state of nature; and when we remember that the greater number of varieties have been produced under domestication by the selection of mere external differences, and that they have not been long exposed to uniform conditions of life. It should also be especially kept in mind, that long-continued domestication tends to eliminate sterility, and is therefore little likely to induce this same quality.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 312
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Chapter 10 Quotes

Independently of our not finding fossil remains of such infinitely numerous connecting links, it may be objected that time cannot have sufficed for so great an amount of organic change, all changes having been effected slowly. It is hardly possible for me to recall to the reader who is not a practical geologist, the facts leading the mind feebly to comprehend the lapse of time. He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology, which the future historian will recognise as having produced a revolution in natural science, and yet does not admit how vast have been the past periods of time, may at once close this volume.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell
Page Number: 316
Explanation and Analysis:

It has been asserted over and over again, by writers who believe in the immutability of species, that geology yields no linking forms. This assertion, as we shall see in the next chapter, is certainly erroneous.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 333
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Chapter 11 Quotes

We can clearly understand why a species when once lost should never reappear, even if the very same conditions of life, organic and inorganic, should recur.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 347
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On the theory of natural selection, the extinction of old forms and the production of new and improved forms are intimately connected together.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 349
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Chapter 12 Quotes

Undoubtedly there are many cases of extreme difficulty in understanding how the same species could possibly have migrated from some one point to the several distant and isolated points, where now found. Nevertheless the simplicity of the view that each species was first produced within a single region captivates the mind. He who rejects it, rejects the vera causa of ordinary generation with subsequent migration, and calls in the agency of a miracle.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 380
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Chapter 13 Quotes

As lakes and river-systems are separated from each other by barriers of land, it might have been thought that fresh-water productions would not have ranged widely within the same country, and as the sea is apparently a still more formidable barrier, that they would never have extended to distant countries. But the case is exactly the reverse. Not only have many fresh-water species, belonging to different classes, an enormous range, but allied species prevail in a remarkable manner throughout the world.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 407
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Chapter 14 Quotes

All the foregoing rules and aids and difficulties in classification may be explained, if I do not greatly deceive myself, on the view that the natural system is founded on descent with modification—that the characters which naturalists consider as showing true affinity between any two or more species, are those which have been inherited from a common parent, all true classification being genealogical—that community of descent is the hidden bond which naturalists have been unconsciously seeking, and not some unknown plan of creation, or the enunciation of general propositions, and the mere putting together and separating objects more or less alike.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 437
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Chapter 15 Quotes

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Related Characters: Charles Darwin
Page Number: 507
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