charles_darwin

Primary Documents Relating to Darwin and Darwinism
It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly
scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the
slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up
all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and
wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic
being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.
We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand
of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect
is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that
the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.
Source: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John
Murray, 1859), 80–81, 83–84.
145
Document 14: The Origin of Species:
The Power of Natural Selection
A key concept underpinning natural selection was uniformitarianism.
The foremost proponent of uniformitarianism in the
nineteenth-century British scientific community was the geologist
Charles Lyell. According to Lyell, all geological formations came into
existence over thousands or millions of years—in other words, very
slowly and gradually.
Darwin applied Lyell’s theory of uniformitarianism to organic
life. Like the sea wearing away a cliff, so natural selection brought
about persistent and permanent changes in species over thousands of
generations.
In Chapter IV of The Origin of Species, Darwin stated explicitly
his debt to Lyell. It is the slow action of natural selection that produces
the wide range of diversity and complexity in the natural
world. Again, with time on its side, Darwin argues that natural selection
will produce changes in species far greater than that achieved
by humans (even though the artificial changes are fairly impressive).
I am well aware that this doctrine of natural selection, exemplified
in the above imaginary instances, is open to the same objections
which were at first urged against Sir Charles Lyell’s noble
views on ‘the modern changes of the earth, as illustrative of geology;’
but we now very seldom hear the action, for instance, of
the coast-waves, called a trifling and insignificant cause, when
applied to the excavation of gigantic valleys or to the formation
of the longest lines of inland cliffs. Natural selection can act
only by preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small