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Sociology and Modern Social Problems by Charles A. (Charles Abram) Ellwood
page 26 of 298 (08%)
that it is also possible to trace man back through fossil human remains
that have been discovered in the earth's crust to the time when he is
apparently just emerging from some apelike form. The latest discovery of
the fossil remains of man made by Dr. Dubois in Java in 1894 shows a
creature with about half the brain capacity of the existing civilized
man and with many apelike characteristics. Thus we cannot except even
man from the theory of evolution and suppose that he was especially
created, as Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's contemporary and colaborer,
and others, have supposed.

(5) The last line of argument in favor of the belief that all existing
species have descended from a few simple primitive forms is found in the
fact of the variation of animals through artificial selection under
domestication. For generations breeders have known that by carefully
selecting the type of animal or plant which they have desired, it is
possible to produce approximately that type. Thus have originated all
the breeds or varieties of domestic plants and animals. Now, Darwin
conceived that nature also exercises a selection by weeding out those
individuals that are not adapted to their environment. In other words,
nature, though unconscious, selects in a negative way the stronger and
the better adapted. Animals vary in nature as well as under
domestication from causes not yet well understood. The variations that
were favorable to survival, Darwin argued, would secure the survival,
through the passing on of these variations by heredity of the better
adapted types of plants and animals. The natural process of weeding out
the inferior or least adapted through early death, or through failure to
reproduce, Darwin called "natural selection", and likened it in its
effect upon organisms to the artificial selection which breeders
consciously use to secure types of plants or animals that they desire.
The only great addition to Darwin's theories which has been made since
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