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Our ancestor was an animal which breathed water, had a swim-bladder, a great swimming tail, an imperfect skull & undoubtedly was an hermaphrodite! Here is a pleasant genealogy for mankind.

Charles Darwin

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Charles Darwin
Age: 73 †
Born: 1809
Born: February 12
Died: 1882
Died: April 19
Beekeeper
Botanist
Carcinologist
Entomologist
Ethologist
Explorer
Geologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Travel Writer
The Mount
Shrewsbury
Charles Robert Darwin
Charles R. Darwin
Darwin
Swim
Skull
Pleasant
Undoubtedly
Evolution
Skulls
Mankind
Tail
Hermaphrodite
Animal
Tails
Hermaphrodites
Water
Ancestor
Genealogy
Science
Swimming
Bladder
Great
Imperfect
Breathed

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The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we ought to control our thoughts.
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A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.
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We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties, such as love, memory, attention and curiosity, imitation, reason, etc., of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals.
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Our faculties are more fitted to recognize the wonderful structure of a beetle than a Universe.
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When it was first said that the sun stood still and world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei [the voice of the people is the voice of God], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science.
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So in regard to mental qualities, their transmission is manifest in our dogs, horses and other domestic animals. Besides special tastes and habits, general intelligence, courage, bad and good tempers. etc., are certainly transmitted.
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Who when examining in the cabinet of the entomologist the gay and exotic butterflies, and singular cicadas, will associate with these lifeless objects, the ceaseless harsh music of the latter, and the lazy flight of the former - the sure accompaniments of the still, glowing noonday of the tropics.
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Every new body of discovery is mathematical in form, because there is no other guidance we can have.
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A surprising number [of novels] have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily-against which a law ought to be passed.
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To suppose that the eye could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree
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I was a young man with uninformed ideas. I threw out queries, suggestions, wondering all the time over everything and to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire. People made a religion of them.
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Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
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To my deep mortification my father once said to me, You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family.
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The age-old and noble thought of 'I will lay down my life to save another,' is nothing more than cowardice.
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People complain of the unequal distribution of wealth [but it is a far greater] injustice that any one man should have the power to write so many brilliant essays... There is no one who writes like [Thomas Huxley].
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A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.
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It is scarcely possible to doubt that the love of man has become instinctive in the dog.
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Till facts are grouped & called there can be no prediction. The only advantage of discovering laws is to foretell what will happen & to see bearing of scattered facts.
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In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
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