On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Selection or partial work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~170,000 words · 804 passages
Cite this work
- APACharles Darwin. (n.d.). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/on-the-origin-of-species-by-means-of-natural-selection
- MLACharles Darwin. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/on-the-origin-of-species-by-means-of-natural-selection.
- ChicagoCharles Darwin. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/charles-darwin/on-the-origin-of-species-by-means-of-natural-selection.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
How species arise with no one to design them: natural selection — more offspring than survive, small heritable variations, vast time — as the mechanism of all living diversity.
Context and history
Published in November 1859 and sold out on the first day. Darwin had nursed the idea for twenty years, alarmed by its consequences, and only resolved to publish when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him the same theory from Malaysia. He deliberately avoided the human being — 'light will be thrown on the origin of man' is all he wrote — but everyone understood. No book of science has changed so profoundly the way the human species sees itself within nature, and the debate it opened is not yet closed.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
will almost certainly entail changes in the mature animal. In monstrosities, the correlations between quite distinct parts are very curious; and many instances are given in Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire's great work on this subject. Breeders believe that long limbs are almost always accompanied by an elongated head. Some instances of correlation are quite whimsical: thus {12} cats with blue eyes are invariably deaf; colour and constitutional peculiarities go together, of which many remarkable cases could be given amongst animals and plants. From the facts collected by Heusinger, it appears that white sheep and pigs are differently affected from coloured individuals by certain vegetable poisons. Hairless dogs have imperfect teeth: long-haired and coarse-haired animals are apt to have, as is asserted, long or many horns; pigeons with feathered feet have skin between their outer toes; pigeons with short beaks have small feet, and those with long beaks large feet. Hence, if man goes on selecting, and thus augmenting, any peculiarity, he will almost certainly unconsciously modify other parts of the structure, owing to the mysterious laws of the correlation of growth. The result of the various, quite unknown, or dimly seen laws of variation is infinitely complex and diversified. It is well worth while carefully to study the several treatises published on some of our old cultivated plants, as on the hyacinth, potato, even the dahlia, &c.; and it is really surprising to note the endless points in structure and constitution in which the varieties and sub-varieties differ slightly from each other. The whole organisation seems to have become plastic, and tends to depart in some small degree from that of the parental type. Any variation which is not inherited is unimportant for us. But the number and diversity of inheritable deviations of structure, both those of slight and those of considerable physiological importance, is endless. Dr.…