ISBN: 9780217457354

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustra… Más…

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1885 Excerpt: ...utterly he missed the true implications of his own vague and chaotic idea. He writes thus to Sir John Herschel in 1836, while Darwin was still but homeward bound on the voyage of the ''Beagle'':--''In regard to the origination of new species, I am very glad to find that you think it probable that it may be carried on through the intervention of intermediate causes.... An insect may be made in one of its transformations to resemble a dead stick, or a leaf, or a lichen, or a stone, so as to be somewhat less easily found by its enemies; or if this would make it too strong, an occasional variety of the species may have this advantage conferred on it; or if this would be still too much, one sex of a certain variety. Probably there is scarcely a dash of colour on the wing or body of which the choice would be quite arbitrary, or which might not affect its duration for thousands of years.'' Now, this comes in some ways perilously near to Darwin indeed; but in the most important point of all it is wide apart from him as the pole is from the equator. For Lyell thought of all this as a matter of external teleological arrangement; he imagined a deliberate power from outside settling it all by design baforehand, and granting to varieties or species these special peculiarities in a manner that was at bottom essentially supernatural, or in other words miraculous; whereas Darwin thinks of it as the necessary result of the circumstances themselves, an inevitable outcome of indefinite variability plus the geometrical rate of increase. Where Lyell sees a final cause, Darwin sees an efficient cause; and this distinction is fundamental. It marks Darwin''s position as that of a great philosophical thinker, who can dash aside at once all metaphysical cobwebs, and penetrate to the inmo... Grant Allen, Books, History, Charles Darwin Books>History, General Books LLC<

ISBN: 0217457355

ISBN: 0217457355

ISBN: 0217457355