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Updated: May 10, 2025
Other writers, led away by Darwinian dogmas, fancied that they had discovered populations which had, as it were, remained in a former animal condition for the instruction of our times."
Nevertheless the Museum of Marvels enjoyed a reputation in humble circles, and here Mahdi was talked of, and accepted without a question, as an astonishing vindication of the Darwinian hypothesis about which the Professor discoursed so fluently in his three minutes' lecture before the cage.
The Darwinian theory implies that the birth and development of a species are as natural as those of an individual, are facts of the same kind in a higher order. The alleged proof of the absence of design from it amounts to a simple reiteration of the statement, with particulars.
As a matter of fact, the Darwinian law does not cause the "survival of the best," but simply the "survival of the fittest." It is obvious that the forms of degeneracy produced by the divers kinds of social selection and notably by the present economic organization merely promote, indeed, and with growing efficiency, the survival of those best fitted for this very economic organization.
The Darwinian hypothesis has the merit of being eminently simple and comprehensible in principle, and its essential positions may be stated in a very few words: all species have been produced by the development of varieties from common stocks; by the conversion of these, first into permanent races and then into new species, by the process of NATURAL SELECTION, which process is essentially identical with that artificial selection by which man has originated the races of domestic animals the STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE taking the place of man, and exerting, in the case of natural selection, that selective action which he performs in artificial selection.
And this explanation, or coincidence of observed with deduced facts, is, so far as it extends, a verification of the Darwinian view. There is no fault to be found with Mr. Darwin's method, then; but it is another question whether he has fulfilled all the conditions imposed by that method.
The truth is, that the idea of evolution emerging from Goethe's mode of regarding nature is the exact opposite of the one held by Darwin and in whatever modified form by his followers. A brief consideration of the Darwinian concepts of inheritance and adaptation will show this.
So far from a gradual progress towards perfection forming any necessary part of the Darwinian creed, it appears to us that it is perfectly consistent with indefinite persistence in one estate, or with a gradual retrogression. Suppose, for example, a return of the glacial epoch and a spread of polar climatal conditions over the whole globe.
But before we can fully understand the exalted position which the Darwinian theory assigns to man, another point demands consideration. The natural selection of psychical peculiarities does not alone account for the origin of Man, or explain his most signal difference from all other animals.
Here I picture to myself a curl on the lip of some advanced Darwinian who, having accompanied me so far, cannot altogether suppress his compassionate scorn at the proposed recurrence now-a-days to a mode of thought so obsolete in the treatment of scientific subjects as the theological. 'Positive biology, he will perhaps superbly exclaim, repeating the words of Mr.
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