Sublime

organic beings must be exposed during several generations to the new conditions of life to cause any appreciable amount of variation; and that when the organisation has once begun to vary, it generally continues to vary for many generations.

If we ask who was more correct—the theologians who argued for a Creator-God, or the intellectually unfulfilled atheists who argued that mice spontaneously generated—then the theologians must be declared the victors: evolution is not God, but it is closer to God than it is to pure random entropy. Mutation is random, but selection is non-random. This

evolutionary psychology

It was that same summer of 1859, with the cornerstone in place, that he returned to Europe, accompanied by his wife, and it was in England the autumn following, in November, that On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection appeared, a volume bound in green cloth and priced at fifteen shillings. The first copy to reach Cambridge, one sent

Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers. —John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture”

These gravel-beds belong in fact to the glacial period, and in after years I found in them broken arctic shells. But I was then utterly astonished at Sedgwick not being delighted at so wonderful a fact as a tropical shell being found near the surface in the middle of England. Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realise, though I had read var

Mistaken as he may have been about evolution, he was by no means alone.

These mutations are most likely to occur during mating and fertilization, and in a world that is constantly changing, adaptation is necessary for survival.