The Making of Species 



selection weeds out relentlessly all organisms 

 which display unfavourable variations. It is 

 thus obvious that many species may, and we 

 believe do, exist which possess characters of no 

 direct utility to them, or even slightly harmful 

 ones. For this reason Wallace and his fol- 

 lowers fail in their attempts to prove that 

 every patch of colour in every organism is of 

 direct utility. Natural selection has to take an 

 animal as it finds it the good with the bad. If 

 an organism as a whole is not wanting that is to 

 say, if it is able to hold its own against other 

 organisms, and is fitted to fill any place in nature 

 that organism will probably survive, although it 

 may be defective in many respects. As its name 

 implies, natural selection is a mere selecting 

 agency. It has to choose from what is presented 

 to it. It is not, as many seem to think, a manu- 

 facturer or inducer of variations. Natural selec- 

 tion can no more make an animal vary in any 

 given direction than the human breeder can. Its 

 power is limited to the destroying of all variations 

 which do not pass the test prescribed by it. 



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