Charles Darwin on Evolution

“I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.”

“The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.”

“Mere chance … alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species and species of the same genus.”

“Authors of the highest eminence seem to be fully satisfied with the view that each species has been independently created. To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, that the production and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the world should have been due to secondary causes, like those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.”