Charles Darwin - Species Quotes

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The several difficulties here discussed, namely our not finding in the successive formations infinitely numerous transitional links between the many species which now exist or have existed; the sudden manner in which whole groups of species appear in our European formations; the almost entire absence, as at present known, of fossiliferous formations beneath the Silurian strata, are all undoubtedly of the gravest nature.

Charles Darwin
I am quite conscious that my speculations run quite beyond the bounds of true science. … I inferred that genera & Families with very few species (i. e. from Extinction) would be apt (not necessarily always) to have narrow ranges & disjoined ranges. You will not perceive, perhaps, what I am driving at & it is not worth enlarging on, — but I look at Extinction as common cause of small genera & disjoined ranges & therefore they ought, if they behaved properly & as nature does not lie to go together!

Charles Darwin
Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.

Charles Darwin
A language, like a species, when once extinct, never…reappears. The same language never has two birth-places."

Charles Darwin
The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.

Charles Darwin
Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.

Charles Darwin
Looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent forms and the intermediate links. Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains.

Charles Darwin
I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

Charles Darwin
When the views entertained in this volume on the origin of species, or when analogous views are generally admitted, we can dimly forsee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.

Charles Darwin
Mere chance … alone would never account for so habitual and large an amount of difference as that between varieties of the same species.

Charles Darwin
Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms.

Charles Darwin
It will be seen that I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, and for mere convenience sake.

Charles Darwin