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.
97/180 page 85
![XIII] Selection in the Animal World allowed space to live and breed freely for 750 years, result in no less than nine¬ teen million animals. By far the larger part of the criticisms of Darwinism by popular writers are due to their continually forgetting these two great natural facts : enormous variability about a mean value of every part and organ ; and such ever-present powers of multiplication that, even in the case of vertebrate animals, of those born every year only a small proportion—one-tenth to one-hundredth or thereabouts—live over the second year. If they all lived their numbers would go on continually increas¬ ing, which we know is not the case. Hence arises what has been termed the struggle for existence, resulting in the survival of the fittest. This struggle for life is either against the forces of inorganic or those of organic nature. Among the former are storms, floods, intense cold, long-continued droughts, or violent blizzards, all of which take toll of the weaker or less wary individuals of each species—those that are less adapted to survive such conditions. In judging how this would act, we must always remember the enor- 85](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18022121_0098.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
