NATURAL SELECTION 77 



Even for plants, then, there are crises. Among animals, 

 however, they are far more frequent, a fact that must be borne 

 in mind if we wish to understand animal life and evolution. It 

 is in the pauses of the struggle that we see the superfluity of 

 energy and the exuberance of vitality that seem to characterise 

 wild life. The survivors have had strength to meet the shocks 

 that time and chance have brought. In the quiet interspaces 

 they have more than the beggarly minimum of vigour required. 

 I have dwelt upon this question at some length because unless 

 we realise how important a part these recurrent crises play, it is 

 impossible to understand one of the most marked tendencies in 

 the evolution of civilised man. 



Before we dismiss the subject for the present, there is some- Sexual 

 thing more to be said. Natural Selection can lead only to a bare selectlon 

 superiority to the environment, to the environment in its harshest 

 phase, when, that is, a severe crisis occurs. But sexual selection 

 can confer something more than such a bare superiority. It can 

 form within a species a kind of aristocracy, fitted, by their 

 advance beyond the minimum of strength or adaptation required 

 by the environment, to meet new conditions of a stringency 

 hitherto unknown. To this subject I shall have to return in the 

 chapter on sexual selection. 



II 



CONSTANCY OF APPARENTLY USELESS CHARACTERS INDEPENDENTLY 

 OF NATURAL SELECTION 



If severe crises, weeding out the unfit, recur at intervals short Examples 

 or long, it might be thought that each organism down to its 

 minutest detail would be a mass of adaptation, and that it would 

 at least be possible to make a plausible suggestion as to the 

 utility of every peculiarity. This is by no means the case and 

 some Darwinians have wavered in their faith through the use- 

 lessness, as it seemed to them, of specific characters generally. 

 I will take a few typical examples and then say what I can by 



