Natural selection
idea · 3 works · 4 mentions · 7 anchored passages
natural selection · Natural Selection
in the texts
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
The evolutionary process invoked to explain how primitive peoples might have noticed the effects of interbreeding.
If such children, left to themselves, are really weakly, the fact would be forced on notice by the stern process of natural selection, affecting either the individual or the tribe.
A very ancient, possibly the most ancient, method of settling these quarrels was that which has been called in our day Natural Selection.
Applied Eugenics
The evolutionary mechanism offered as a sufficient alternative explanation for progressive and retrogressive changes in organisms, making Lamarckian inheritance unnecessary.
Progressive changes can be satisfactorily accounted for by natural selection;
The many instances quoted by historians, where races have changed after immigration, are to be explained in most cases by natural selection under new conditions, or by interbreeding with the natives, and not as the direct result of climate.
The retrogression of the little toe in man is probably to be explained like the degeneration of the hind leg of the whale, as a result of the excess of deteriorating variations which, when not eliminated by natural selection, lead to atrophy.
Law in a Free State
The Darwinian mechanism invoked twice as the biological process by which a free marriage system would improve the race.
Natural selection would effect that.
And the extinction of fortune-hunters—the eradication of this fatal incitement to unchaste unions—would mightily strengthen natural selection, and so improve the race.