Abstract
IN NATURE of June 8 there appears a letter from my friend Prof. Poulton in which he replies to my statement that ‘natural selection’ affords no explanation of evolution. He quotes in extenso a letter from Darwin to the distinguished American botanist Asa Gray, in which Darwin endeavours to deal with the objection that natural selection is a truism and that variations are produced by definite causes and are not due to ‘chance’. Darwin compares the action of natural selection to that of a man building a house from stones of all shapes found at the foot of a precipice on a mountain-side. The shapes of these stones, he says, would be due to definite causes, but the uses to which the stones were put in building the house would not be explicable by these causes.
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MACBRIDE, E. Natural Selection. Nature 124, 225 (1929). https://doi.org/10.1038/124225a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/124225a0
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