It is a fact that the increase in the birth of animals is greater
than the existing food permits of sustaining. There is no exception
to the rule that all organic beings tend to increase so rapidly that
our earth would be overrun very soon by the offspring of a single
pair, were these not destroyed. It is for this reason that a struggle
for existence must arise. Every animal tries to live, does its best
to eat, and seeks to avoid being eaten by others. With its particular
peculiarities and weapons it struggles against the entire antagonistic
world, against animals, cold, heat, dryness, inundations, and other
natural occurrences that may threaten to destroy it. Above all, it
struggles with the animals of its own kind, who live in the same way,
have the same peculiarities, use the same weapons and live by the same
nourishment. This struggle is not a direct one; the hare does not
struggle directly with the hare, nor the lion with the lion――unless
it is a struggle for the female――but it is a struggle for existence,
a race, a competitive struggle. All of them can not reach a grown-up
age; most of them are destroyed, and only those who win the race
remain. But which are the ones to win in the race? Those which, through
their peculiarities, through their bodily structures are best able
to find food or to escape an enemy; in other words, those which are
best adapted to existing conditions will survive. “Because there are
ever more individuals born than can remain alive, the struggle as to
which shall remain alive must start again and that creature that has
some advantage over the others will survive, but as these diverging
peculiarities are transmitted to the new generations, nature itself
does the choosing, and a new generation will arise having changed
peculiarities.”
Here we have another application for the origin of the giraffe. When
grass does not grow in some places, the animals must nourish themselves
on tree leaves, and all those whose necks are too short to reach these
leaves must perish. In nature itself there is selection, and nature
selects only those having long necks. In conformity with the selection
done by the animal breeder, Darwin called this process “natural
selection.”
This process must necessarily produce new species. Because too many
are born of a certain species, more than the existing food supply can
sustain, they are forever trying to spread over a larger area. In order
to procure their food, those living in the woods go to the plain, those
living on the soil go into the water, and those living on the ground
climb on trees. Under these new conditions divergence is necessary.
These divergencies are increased, and from the old species a new one
develops. This continuous movement of existing species branching out
into new relations results in these thousands of different animals
changing still more.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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