"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?
I'm the one discussing science as you try to define it. You are harping on Noah. Well knock yourself out with Noah, just leave me out of it.
Wow! To think that with one sweeping sentence Darwin struck a decisive blow against hundreds of generations of widely accepted fact. Perhaps if he were alive today you would kneel before him in adoration.