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What can be more curious than that the hand of a man, formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of the horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern?

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
Curious
Grasping
Men
Patterns
Constructed
Legs
Bats
Wings
Digging
Porpoise
Horse
Wing
Porpoises
Hand
Formed
Paddle
Pattern
Mole
Hands
Construction
Moles
Form

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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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I look at the natural geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept and written in a changing dialect of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved and of each page, only here and there a few lines.
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Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.
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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.
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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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At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.
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A bad earthquake at once destroys the oldest associations: the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, has moved beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid one second of time has conveyed to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never have created.
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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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I trust and believe that the time spent in this voyage ... will produce its full worth in Natural History and it appears to me the doing what little we can to increase the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life, as one can in any likelihood pursue.
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Life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.
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The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
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Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music.
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I fully subscribe to the judgement of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animal, the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important....It is the most noble of all the attributes of man.
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On seeing the marsupials in Australia for the first time and comparing them to placental mammals: “An unbeliever . . . might exclaim 'Surely two distinct Creators must have been at work'”
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Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
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The assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for his existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of many cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent deity.
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Thomson's views on the recent age of the world have been for some time one of my sorest troubles.
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It is impossible to concieve of this immense and wonderful universe as the result of blind chance or necessity.
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Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.
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My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.
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