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With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.

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
Degrees
Subordinates
Depends
Savage
Progress
Tribes
Nations
Savages
Natural
Continued
Supplant
Another
Selection
Exterminate
Highly
Subordinate
Degree
Civilised

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He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.
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But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
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But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created that a cat should play with mice.
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Attention, if sudden and close, graduates into surprise and this into astonishment and this into stupefied amazement.
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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.
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Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval [tropical] forests, ... temples filled with the varied productions of the God of Nature. No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.
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Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature's cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.
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Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
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A language, like a species, when extinct, never... reappears.
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