The very essence of instinct is that it's followed independently of reason.
This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.
Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.
We are optimists, until we are not.
It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.
I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.
Blushing is the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.
There is no fundamental difference between man and animals in their ability to feel pleasure and pain, happiness, and misery.
On the ordinary view of each species having been independently created, we gain no scientific explanation.
The question of whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed.
Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system- with all these exalted powers- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
It is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.
It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
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.
To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.
The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.
Only the fittest will survive.
Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.
If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
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