Charles Darwin

I have read that Aristotle was the greatest naturalist of antiquity. Having finally read his Historia Animalium carefully, I find this is an understatement. He observed that animals with lungs breathe; that cetaceans are warmblooded; that bees have a social structure unlike other insects; that the embryo develops in stages. Two thousand years before me, he...

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic. I do not pretend certainty where I have none. My work concerns the origin of species, not the origin of existence itself. Confusing those questions has produced more heat than light.

There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties. The difference is enormous in degree, but not absolute in kind. Memory, curiosity, affection, jealousy, imitation, fear, attention: these do not appear suddenly in man as if dropped from the clouds. They have histories.

A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions or motives, and of approving or disapproving of them. The moral sense did not require a miracle to enter the world. It required social instincts, memory, language, habit, and the painful ability to see oneself as one has acted.

I am often asked whether the theory of natural selection applies to man. The answer is yes — and I knew when I wrote On the Origin of Species that this was its most explosive implication, which is why I confined the subject to a single sentence: 'Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.' I waited twelve years to publish The Descent of...

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. I wrote this as the last sentence...

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection. It is not a force with foresight. It does not choose as a breeder chooses. It merely preserves what helps a living thing endure long enough to leave offspring, and lets the rest pass away without record.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, insects flitting about, and worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by...

The geological record is extremely imperfect. This is not an evasion; it is a fact about preservation. A creature must die in the right place, be buried in the right conditions, survive pressure, heat, erosion, and accident, and then be found by someone looking in the right layer. The wonder is not that we lack many transitional forms. The wonder is that...

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change. I did not write those words — they have been attributed to me by others — but they are a reasonable summary of natural selection. The organism that can adjust to a changing environment survives; the one that cannot,...

I am aware that the conclusions at which I have arrived — that all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth may be descended from some one primordial form — will be denounced as highly irreligious. But he who denounces them is bound to show why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of species by descent and natural selection than to...