CHAPTER V 



GENERAL CONCLUSION 



The keynote of this book is that selection is uninterruptedly 

 active in eliminating all the waste products of organic activity, 

 and that without this unceasing intervention of selection life 

 must inevitably regress. Once this central fact is grasped, the 

 importance of the action of selection in social life will be appre- 

 ciated. But selection itself does but operate in order to secure, 

 for all organic Ufe, an ever more harmonious adaptation to 

 environing conditions. Adaptation to the environment would 

 appear to be the fundamental law of Nature ; and selection 

 would appear to be the means of obtaining this adapta- 

 tion. 



Thus the " aim " of Nature — ^in so far as we are justified in 

 ascribing an aim to her — ^is not a moral but a mechanical one. 

 Adaptation to the environment is obtained by merciless methods, 

 by the ruthless extermination of unfavourable variations, by 

 the wholesale destruction of the weak and the ill-adapted. The 

 " aim " of evolution is not even the production of physically 

 stronger or more beautiful organisms. There is a great deal 

 in Nature that is beautiful ; but there is much also that is the 

 reverse. Along with the evolution of more greatly difierentiated 

 forms of life, the less differentiated have remained. The evolu- 

 tion of the Gibbon and Man has not caused the extinction of 

 the Amoeba ; and how much is there in the organic world which 

 seems to us useless — nay, positively repugnant ? But these 

 apparently useless forms of life persist ; and the only reason we 



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