4 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 
“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with 
many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with 
various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the 
damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, 
so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so com- 
plex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. 
These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduc- 
tion; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability 
from the indirect and direct action of the condition of life, and 
from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a struggle 
for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Diver- 
gence of Character andthe Extinction of less-improvedforms. Thus, 
from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted 
object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of 
the higher animals, directly follows. There isa grandeur in this view 
of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the 
Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has 
gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a 
beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, 
and are being evolved. ’’—Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, conclud- 
ing paragraph. 
“‘ Speaking broadly we find as a fact that transmutation of species 
through the geologic ages has been accompanied by increasing diver- 
gence of type, by the increased specialization of certain forms, and by 
the closer and closer adaptation to conditions of life on the part of the 
forms most highly specialized, the more perfect adaptation and the 
more elaborate specialization being associated with the greatest 
variety or variation in the environment. Accepting for this process 
the name organic evolution, Herbert Spencer has deduced from it the 
general law, that as life endures generation after generation, its 
character, as shown in structure and function, undergoes constant 
differentiation and specialization. In this view, the transmutation 
of species is not merely an observed process, but a primitive necessity 
involved in the very organization of life itself.’”-—D. S. Jordan and 
V. L. Kellogg, Evolution and Animal Life (1908), p. 4. 
“The Doctrine of Evolution is a body of principles and facts con- 
cerning the present condition and past history of the living and lifeless 
things that make up the universe. It teaches that natural processes 
