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Yet unless it be thoroughly engrained in the mind I am convinced that the whole economy of nature, with every fact on distribution, rarity, abundance, extinction, and variation, will be dimly seen or quite misunderstood. Universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind. When you read the following passages from the first edition of Darwin's shattering book, see if you can predict what effects it might have on Victorian and later authors, and as you read them, check your guesses. The effect of all these points was to move manĪway from the center of creation and imply that he could hardly be its crowning that the genetic variations ultimately producing increased survivability are random and not caused (as religious thinkers would have it) by God or (as Lammarck would have it) by the organism's own striving for perfection.Requires enormously long periods of time, so long, in fact, that the everydayĮxperience of human beings provides them with no ability to interpret such that natural selection, development, and evolution.that this struggle for existence culls out those organisms less well adapted to any particular ecology and allows those better adapted to flourish - a process called Natural Selection.that all life, biologically considered, takes the form of a struggle to exist - more exactly, to exist and produce the greatest number of offspring.That biological types or species do not have a fixed, static existence but exist in permanent states of change and flux.The first edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, made several points that had major impact on nineteenth-century thought: 8ĭarwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Annie Dillard, A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, ch. Form follows function in the created world, so far as I know, and the creature that fnctions, however bizarre, survives to pepetuate its form.

Utility to the creature is evolution's only aesthetic consideration. There is no one standing over evolution with a blue pencil to say, “Now that one, there, is absolutely ridiculous, and I won't have it.” If the creature makes it, it gets a “stet.”.