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Nothing can be more hopeless than to attempt to explain this similarity of pattern in members of the same class, by utility or by the doctrine of final causes.

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
Finals
Explain
Doctrine
Similarity
Patterns
Utility
Members
Pattern
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Hopeless
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Nothing
Attempt

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We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.
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He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.
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The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
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Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.
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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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I ought, or I ought not, constitute the whole of morality.
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A grand and almost untrodden field of inquiry will be opened, on the causes and laws of variation, on correlation of growth, on the effects of use and disuse, on the direct actions of external conditions, and so forth.
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It's not the strongest, but the most adaptable that survive.
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It at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed.
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It is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance.
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There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
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We behold the face of nature bright with gladness.
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I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place. Amongst the natives there is absent that charming simplicity .... and the greater part of the English are the very refuse of society.
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Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last it was complete.
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He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
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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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If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
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I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious views of anyone.
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Progress has been much more general than retrogression
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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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