"From the time when the social and sympathetic feelings came into
operation and the intellectual and moral faculties became fairly
developed, man would cease to be influenced by natural selection in
his physical form and structure. As an animal he would remain almost
stationary, the changes in the surrounding universe ceasing to produce
in him that powerful modifying effect which they exercise on other
parts of the organic world. But, from the moment that the form of his
body became stationary, his mind would become subject to those very
influences from which his body had escaped; every slight variation in
his mental and moral nature which should enable him better to guard
against adverse circumstances and combine for mutual comfort and
protection would be preserved and accumulated; the better and higher
specimens of our race would therefore increase and spread, the lower and
more brutal would give way and successively die out, and that rapid
advancement of mental organisation would occur which has raised the very
lowest races of man so far above the brutes (although differing so
little from some of them in physical structure), and, in conjunction
with scarcely perceptible modifications of form, has developed the
wonderful intellect of the European races" (pp. 316, 317, Second
Edition, 1871).
This argument has suggestive illustration in the fifth chapter of the
Origin of Species. Mr. Darwin there refers to a remark to the following
effect made by Mr. Waterhouse: "_A part developed in any species in an
extraordinary degree or manner in comparison with the same part in
allied species tends to be highly variable._" This applies only where
there is unusual development. "Thus, the wing of a bat is a most
abnormal structure in the class of mammals; but the rule would not apply
here, because the whole group of bats possesses wings; it would apply
only if some one species had wings developed in a remarkable manner in
comparison with the other species of the same genus." And when this
exceptional development of any part or organ occurs, we may conclude
that the modification has arisen since the period when the several
species branched off from the common progenitor of the genus; and this
period will seldom be very remote, as species rarely endure for more
than one geological period.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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