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.
121/180 page 109
![XV] Heredity and Environment the ever-present beetle tribe, more varied in form, structure, ornament, and colour than any other comparable group of living things, to the widely different lepidoptera, equalling, or perhaps surpassing, the whole class of birds in their marvellous grace and beauty, yet all utterly beyond any pos¬ sible direct action of the environment or of use and disuse in their development, and their close adaptation to that environ¬ ment. Organic nature is indisputably one and indivisible. It has been developed throughout by means of the fundamental forces of life, of growth and reproduction, and the equally fundamental laws of varia¬ tion, heredity, and enormous increase, re¬ sulting in a perpetual adaptation in form, structure, colour, and habits to the slowly changing environment. These forces and laws are universal in their action ; they are demonstrably adequate to the pro¬ duction of the whole of the phenomena we are now discussing. We see, then, that over by far the greater part of the whole world of life any modification of external structure, form, or colouring during the life of the individual is impossible ; while in the remainder its action, if it log](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18022121_0122.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
