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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: some few still living organic beings belong to Silurian genera. So that
the amount or value of the differences between organic beings all related
to each other in the same degree in blood, has come to be widely different.
Nevertheless their genealogical arrangement remains strictly true, not only
at the present time, but at each successive period of descent. All the
modified descendants from A will have inherited something in common from
their common parent, as will all the descendants from I; so will it be with
each subordinate branch of descendants, at each successive period. If,
however, we choose to suppose that any of the descendants of A or of I have
been so much modified as to have more or less completely lost traces of
their parentage, in this case, their places in a natural classification
On the Origin of Species |
