CHAPTER IV. NATURAL SELECTION; OR THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.
8. THE PROBABLE EFFECTS OF THE ACTION OF NATURAL SELECTION THROUGH DIVERGENCE OF CHARACTER AND EXTINCTION, ON THE DESCENDANTS OF A COMMON ANCESTOR. (continued)
It is worth while to reflect for a moment on the character of the new
species F14, which is supposed not to have diverged much in character, but
to have retained the form of (F), either unaltered or altered only in a
slight degree. In this case its affinities to the other fourteen new
species will be of a curious and circuitous nature. Being descended from a
form that stood between the parent-species (A) and (I), now supposed to be
extinct and unknown, it will be in some degree intermediate in character
between the two groups descended from these two species. But as these two
groups have gone on diverging in character from the type of their parents,
the new species (F14) will not be directly intermediate between them, but
rather between types of the two groups; and every naturalist will be able
to call such cases before his mind.
In the diagram each horizontal line has hitherto been supposed to represent
a thousand generations, but each may represent a million or more
generations; it may also represent a section of the successive strata of
the earth's crust including extinct remains. We shall, when we come to our
chapter on geology, have to refer again to this subject, and I think we
shall then see that the diagram throws light on the affinities of extinct
beings, which, though generally belonging to the same orders, families, or
genera, with those now living, yet are often, in some degree, intermediate
in character between existing groups; and we can understand this fact, for
the extinct species lived at various remote epochs when the branching lines
of descent had diverged less.
I see no reason to limit the process of modification, as now explained, to
the formation of genera alone. If, in the diagram, we suppose the amount
of change represented by each successive group of diverging dotted lines to
be great, the forms marked a14 to p14, those marked b14 and f14, and those
marked o14 to m14, will form three very distinct genera. We shall also
have two very distinct genera descended from (I), differing widely from the
descendants of (A). These two groups of genera will thus form two distinct
families, or orders, according to the amount of divergent modification
supposed to be represented in the diagram. And the two new families, or
orders, are descended from two species of the original genus; and these are
supposed to be descended from some still more ancient and unknown form.
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