12/02/2007 (Day 74) - Natural Selection

What better way to spend some time on Darwin Day than reading his writings? In this case a small booklet containing Chapters 3 and 4 of 'The Origin Of Species'.

"It may ... be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long-past geological ages, that we see only that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were."

(Charles Darwin "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection", Chapter 4, 1859)