Weakness and stupidity everywhere survive.
There is no way of determining fitness except in that a thing does
survive.
"Fitness," then, is only another name for "survival."
Darwinism:
That survivors survive.
Although Darwinism, then, seems positively baseless, or absolutely
irrational, its massing of supposed data, and its attempted coherence
approximate more highly to Organization and Consistency than did the
inchoate speculations that preceded it.
Or that Columbus never proved that the earth is round.
Shadow of the earth on the moon?
No one has ever seen it in its entirety. The earth's shadow is much
larger than the moon. If the periphery of the shadow is curved--but the
convex moon--a straight-edged object will cast a curved shadow upon a
surface that is convex.
All the other so-called proofs may be taken up in the same way. It was
impossible for Columbus to prove that the earth is round. It was not
required: only that with a higher seeming of positiveness than that of
his opponents, he should attempt. The thing to do, in 1492, was
nevertheless to accept that beyond Europe, to the west, were other
lands.
I offer for acceptance, as something concordant with the spirit of this
first quarter of the 20th century, the expression that beyond this earth
are--other lands--from which come things as, from America, float things
to Europe.
As to yellow substances that have fallen upon this earth, the endeavor
to exclude extra-mundane origins is the dogma that all yellow rains and
yellow snows are colored with pollen from this earth's pine trees.
_Symons' Meteorological Magazine_ is especially prudish in this respect
and regards as highly improper all advances made by other explainers.
Nevertheless, the _Monthly Weather Review_, May, 1877, reports a
golden-yellow fall, of Feb. 27, 1877, at Peckloh, Germany, in which four
kinds of organisms, not pollen, were the coloring matter. There were
minute things shaped like arrows, coffee beans, horns, and disks.