and habits, to be advantageous to them, it would be a most extraordinary fact of no variations had ever occurred useful to each being's own welfare . . . But if variations useful to any being ever do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterized will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life . . .this principle of preservation [preservation is actually the opposite of diversification of many varieties from one species] I have called Natural Selection. It leads to the improvement of each creature in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life, and consequently, in most cases, to what must be regarded as an advance in organization." (Darwin, Origin, pp.60-63, Benton Pub., 1952)In another place Darwin wrote: "The fact, as we have seen, that all past and present organic beings can be arranged within a few great classes, in groups subordinate to groups . . .The real affinities of all organic beings, in contradistinction to their adaptive resemblances, are due to inheritance or community of descent . . . I believe that animals are descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number. Analogy would lead me one step farther, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants are descended from some one prototype. . .As species are produced and exterminated by slowly acting and still existing causes, and not by . miraculous acts of creation, and as the most important of all causes of organic change is . . .the improvement of one organism entailing the improvement or the extinction of others . . ." (Darwin, Origin, pp.238-243)Jean Baptiste Robinet (1735-1820) fully anticipated Darwin on the gradual accumulation of beneficial adaptions to produce new species from pre-existing ones. Robinet wrote almost a complete synthesis of Darwin's basic theory years before Darwin's birth: "Each generation introduces some differences and these differences endlessly multiplied and a...
