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Directory of Evolutionary Biology
"It
is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants
of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting
about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that
these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and
dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced
by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being
Growth and Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction;
Variability from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life
and from use and disuse: a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle
for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence
of Character and the Extinction of less-imprved forms. Thus, from the war
of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are
capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly
follows. There is a 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 cycling 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."
- Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species
by Means of Natural Selection
Please send questions or comments to David_Rand@brown.edu
