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
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.
Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.
Nothing exists for itself alone, but only in relation to other forms of life
At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Light may be shed on man and his origins.
It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.
I am not apt to follow blindly the lead of other men
In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.
I trust and believe that the time spent in this voyage ... will produce its full worth in Natural History; and it appears to me the doing what little we can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.
It has sometimes been said that the success of the Origin proved "that the subject was in the air," or "that men's minds were prepared for it." I do not think that this is strictly true, for I occasionally sounded not a few naturalists, and never happened to come across a single one who seemed to doubt about the permanence of species.
I would give absolutely nothing for the theory of Natural Selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent.
The world will not be inherited by the strongest, it will be inherited by those most able to change.
I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.