More Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 2 by Charles Darwin
page 66 of 886 (07%)
page 66 of 886 (07%)
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your house.")
LETTER 418. TO G.A. GASKELL. Down, November 15th, 1878. (418/1. This letter has been published in Clapperton's "Scientific Meliorism," 1885, page 340, together with Mr. Gaskell's letter of November 13th (page 337). Mr. Gaskell's laws are given in his letter of November 13th, 1878. They are:-- I. The Organological Law: Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. II. The Sociological Law: Sympathetic Selection, or Indiscriminate Survival. III. The Moral Law: Social Selection, or the Birth of the Fittest.) Your letter seems to me very interesting and clearly expressed, and I hope that you are in the right. Your second law appears to be largely acted on in all civilised countries, and I just alluded to it in my remarks to the effect (as far as I remember) that the evil which would follow by checking benevolence and sympathy in not fostering the weak and diseased would be greater than by allowing them to survive and then to procreate. With regard to your third law, I do not know whether you have read an article (I forget when published) by F. Galton, in which he proposes certificates of health, etc., for marriage, and that the best should be |
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