Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace.
- Alfred Russel Wallace
- Date:
- 1913
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Social environment and moral progress / by Alfred Russel Wallace. Source: Wellcome Collection.
101/180 page 89
![XIII] Selection in the Animal World infinitely varied and beautiful productions of Nature have been developed. There is really not one single part or organ of any plant or animal that cannot have been derived by means of the fundamental facts of variability and reproduction from some allied plant or animal. It is iateresting here to note, that the two essential factors of the process of con¬ stant adaptation to the environment by great variability and rapid multiplication, formed no part of Lamarck's theory, which some people still think to be as good as Darwin's. Equally suggestive is the fact that, while extensive groups of life-pheno¬ mena, such as colour, weapons, hair, scales, and feathers, can hardly be conceived as having been produced or modified by effort or by the direct action of the environ¬ ment, they are yet, every one of them, perfectly explained by the fundamental and necessary processes of variability and survival, acting slowly and continuously, but with intermittent periods of extreme activity at long intervals, on all living things. One of the weakest and most foolish of all the objections to the Darwinian theory is, that it does not explain varia- 89](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18022121_0102.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
