Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin, FRS FRGS FLS FZSwas an English naturalist and geologist, best known for his contributions to the science of evolution. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in...
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth12 February 1809
CityShrewsbury, England
Although much remains obscure, and will long remain obscure, ... I am convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.
Mere chance ... alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species.
A republic cannot succeed, till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.
A language, like a species, when extinct, never ... reappears.
Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future.
Some call it evolution, And others call it God.
People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].
In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.
The presence of a body of well-instructed men, who have not to labor for their daily bread, is important to a degree which cannot be overestimated; as all high intellectual work is carried on by them, and on such work material progress of all kinds mainly depends, not to mention other and higher advantages.
We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.
I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.
I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.
The more one thinks, the more one feels the hopeless immensity of man's ignorance.