The tendency to variation in living beings, which all admitted as a matter of fact; the selective influence of conditions, which no one could deny to be a matter of fact, when his attention was...

One of the truly bizarre things about our current cultural situation is that the leading figures of the scientific establishment seem genuinely amazed that the citizens do not accept finch-beak variation as proof of the...

Perhaps if zoologists would contemplate the wide variations presented by many plants of indubitably one and the same species, and the still wider diversities of long cultivated races from an original stock, they would find...

Genius, throughout history, has been found difficult to classify because it varies in amount: It’s rare to find a genius in the context of the noun, but most people, if not all, have a bit...

In Paley’s famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function, or purpose, of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that...

Evolution, thus, is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. No longer is a fixed object transformed, as in transformational evolution, but an entirely new start is, so to speak, made...

Natural science in England, as Darwin already knew to his cost, was still the purview of Christian scholars. But here was a question that Darwin found compelling: if God had created all the creatures of...

In Darwin’s time no serious attempt had been made to examine the manifestations of variability. A vast assemblage of miscellaneous facts could formerly be adduced as seemingly comparable illustrations of the phenomenon “Variation.” Time has...

soup.” In this primeval soup, by infinite variations of lifeless growth and decay of substances during some billions of years, the way of life was ultimately reached, with its metabolism characterized by selective assimilation and...