356 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
So soundly was the theory of evolution by natural selection 
grounded that research does nothing but confirm the links in its 
chain of evidence and the inferences to be drawn from them. Its 
field has extended from the explanation of the production of plants 
and animals to every aspect of the intellectual life of man, and it ° 
would be imprudent to doubt that its greatest triumph may yet lie in 
the highest aspect of that life. Some persons have attempted to 
discredit natural selection, on the grounds that being a destructive 
agent it cannot produce anything new or make the fit fitter. Such 
persons have only demonstrated that they have neither understood 
the problem nor studied “The Origin of Species,” in which Darwin 
carefully pointed out that “several writers have misapprehended or 
objected to the term ‘Natural Selection.’ Some have even imagined 
that natural selection induces variability, whereas it implies only the 
preservation of such variations as arise and are beneficial to the 
being under its conditions of life.” Variation produces novelties at 
random, but selection determines which are preserved. Only a genius 
could have discovered a key of such simplicity to so great a problem. 
Only ignorance, neglect of truth, or prejudice could actuate those 
who, in the present state of knowledge, without discovering new 
facts in the laboratory or in the field, seek to impugn the scientific 
evidence for evolution. 
With such new formulations as may be required, the concept of 
evolution by natural selection continues and will continue to provide 
what Darwin hoped when he wrote in 1837 in his Notebook: “My 
theory would give zest to recent and fossil comparative anatomy; it 
would lead to the study of instincts, heredity and mind . . . toclosest 
examination of hybridity—to what circumstances favour crossing 
and what prevents it—and generation, causes of change in order 
to know what we have come from and to what we tend. This and 
direct examination of direct passages of structure of species, might 
lead to laws of change, which would then be the main object of study, 
to guide our speculations.” 
With the same confidence as it accepts Copernicus’s demonstration 
of the movement of the earth around the sun and Newton’s formula- 
tion of the laws of this movement, science can now celebrate the 
centenary of the first general principle to be discovered applicable to 
the entire realm of living beings. 
