Over a 150 years after Charles Darwin declared that “all organic beings are exposed
to severe competition,” a competition for life, no one has refuted him convincingly
(Darwin, 1964, p. 70). Rather, within the span of the above years his influence
has expanded, laying the foundation for today’s Life Sciences. He further remarks that:
Owing to this struggle, variations, however slight and from whatever cause
proceeding, if they be in any degree profitable to the individuals of a species, in
their infinitely complex relations to other organic beings and to their physical
conditions of life, will tend to the preservation of such individuals, and will
generally be inherited by the offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of the many individuals of any species which are
periodically born, but a small number can survive. I have called this principle, by
which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection,
in order to mark its relation to man’s power of selection. . . . But Natural
Selection, we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is
as immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are
to those of Art.
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