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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 27 Jan 2022

Taken: 26 Jan 2022

0 favorites     1 comment    27 visits

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Image •
Excerpt •
Philosophers •
A Very Short Introduction •
Author •
Edward Craig •
Darwin •

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PROF. DARWIN

This is the ape of form
Love's Labor Lost, act 5, scene 2.

Some four or five descents since.
All's Well that Ends Well, act 3, sc.7
Comments
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
. . . . Darwin’s judgment is at its best. He doesn’t try to prove his point, but just shows that anyone opposing it ill have a lot more talking to do. If there was an original fantail pigeon, where it is now found in the wild? Well, perhaps it has become extinct, or lives somewhere frightfully remote. And how about the other distinctive breeds that pigeon-fanciers are interested in -- where are their wild relatives? And what of the fact that within these breeds one occasionally finds individuals that closely match th complex colouring of a type of pigeon that does exist in the wild nowadays? So is it that all today’s distinctive breeds had ancestors of the same colouring (although they were distinct species), and are now all either extinct in the wild or at least have never been observed> Well, well, how very surprising…..

Once thoughts like these have brought us to see that very substantial change is possible, indeed positively likely, and when we recall (what was only just becoming clear to geologists when Darwin was a young man) that these processes may have been going on for an almost unthinkable length of time, certain observations strike one differently, like those darwin offers in one of the very few sentences in which human beings figure: ‘The framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a bat, fin of the porpoise, and leg of the horse -- the same number of vertebrae forming the neck of the giraffe and of the elephant . . .at once explain themselves on the theory of descent with slow and slight successive modifications. ~ Page 89
2 years ago.

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