Sublime

When Charles Darwin was trying to decide whether he should propose to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, he got out a pencil and paper and weighed every possible consequence. In favor of marriage he listed children, companionship, and the “charms of music & female chit-chat.” Against marriage he listed the “terrible loss of time,” lack of freedom to go

organic beings must be exposed during several generations to the new conditions of life to cause any appreciable amount of variation; and that when the organisation has once begun to vary, it generally continues to vary for many generations.

Evolution does not care about objectivity – it only cares about fitness.

underlying mechanism: that a microscopic chemical recipe produces variation within and between species. Several decades after his death, however, the field of evolutionary biology became shaped by an idea called the modern synthesis. It’s a simple but powerful model that is useful for understanding social and cultural change within humans as well a

During my last year at Cambridge, I read with care and profound interest Humboldt's 'Personal Narrative.' This work, and Sir J. Herschel's 'Introduction to the Study of Natural Philosophy,' stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one or a dozen other books influenced me

—reminds me of Buckle whom I once met at Hensleigh Wedgwood's. I was very glad to learn from him his system of collecting facts. He told me that he bought all the books which he read, and made a full index, to each, of the facts which he thought might prove serviceable to him, and that he could always remember in what book he had read anything, for