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To: shubi
Try the following in context.

And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/chapter-14.html

1,418 posted on 12/05/2004 6:14:24 PM PST by AndrewC (New Senate rule -- Must vote on all Presidential appointments period certain.)
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To: AndrewC

That isn't the quote you mentioned before. Don't you know where that came from? Or did you just fabricate it?

I will get back to you on the new one.


1,421 posted on 12/05/2004 6:18:58 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
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To: AndrewC
And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

I suppose in a court of law you could make a case. Fortunately, science moves on, even when scientists make statements that turn out to be less than perfectly worded, or even wrong.

But before you gloat, I would like to point out that an individual that benefits its species is "perfect" even if its life is short, miserable, and without offspring.

1,422 posted on 12/05/2004 6:24:57 PM PST by js1138 (D*mn, I Missed!)
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To: AndrewC
. . . all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

Robbed of this pretext, theories of evolution are reduced to mere observations of interrelated shifts toward no particular end. Much as some would disavow Darwin on this point, it is a tenet held dear, and rightly so if one is going to assume a long history of progression, uniform or not. It means more to these folks than the so-called cornerstone of evolution theories, namely, the fossil record. It is beyond comprehension that such pursuits have gained unquestioned status in the classroom under the name of science.

1,429 posted on 12/05/2004 6:36:05 PM PST by Fester Chugabrew
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To: AndrewC

"Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species of each genus, and all the species of many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretel that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection. "

The above is the paragraph from Darwin's Origin with your quote the last sentence. The full context of the paragraph is one of many in this chapter that refutes special creation in favor of natural selection and constant change rather than immutable species.

It is rather funny that the full paragraph includes a sentence saying"no cataclysm has desolated the whole world".
Pretty much destroys the Noah flood literalist idea, eh?


1,431 posted on 12/05/2004 6:37:59 PM PST by shubi (Peace through superior firepower.)
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