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.
107/180 page 95
![XIV] Selection Modified by Mind when we realise the enormous efíect his mind has produced, in modifying and almost neutralising the action of that great law of natural selection which has held supreme sway in every other portion of the organic world. We have seen in the preceding chapter how every form of organic life during all the vast extent of geological time has been sub¬ ject to the law of natural selection, which has incessantly moulded their bodily form and structure, external and internal, in strict adaptation to the successive changes of the world around them ; while that world was itself hardly, if at all, modified by them. A few isolated cases—such as the formation of islands by the coral-forming zoophytes, or the damming of a few rivers by the rude though very remarkable labours of the beaver—can hardly be considered as form¬ ing exceptions to this law. But so soon as man appeared upon the earth, even in the earliest periods at which we have any proofs of his existence, or in the lowest state of barbarism in which we are now able to study him, we find him able to use and act upon the forces of Nature, and to modify his environment, both inorganic and organic, in ways which 95](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18022121_0108.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
