Octavia E. Butler Quotes
The differences you perceive between Humans-between groups of Humans-are the result of isolation and inbreeding, mutation, and adaptation to different Earth environments
Butler, Octavia E. Dawn. Warner Books, 1987.
Darwin’s work had polarized England into two camps. Spencer was one of the major public supporters of Darwin. Tennyson expressed a similar intuitive view a decade earlier {627586}. Spencer reasoned that if an egg cell and a sperm cell could produce a human in 9 months, why was it not plausible that the cell could become a human in hunreds of millions of years.
This is a very important quotation in the history of science. Note that he has the concept of evolution and mutation before Darwin published his his Origin of Species. Darwin had probably come to these conclusions at the time that Lawrence gave this lecture. And of course Darwin had a much broader concept and much data to back it up. But this was one of the great insights in science.
This quotation from this letter was one of the key items of evidence showing that Wallace had independently developed the concept of Evolution before Darwin published his famous treatise. Darwin began formulating his theory of natural selection in the late 1830s but he went on working quietly on it for twenty years. He wanted to amass a wealth of evidence before publicly presenting his idea. During those years he corresponded briefly with Wallace (right), who was exploring the wildlife of South America and Asia. Wallace supplied Darwin with birds for his studies and decided to seek Darwin's help in publishing his own ideas on evolution. He sent Darwin his theory in 1858, which, to Darwin's shock, nearly replicated Darwin's own…. Joseph Dalton Hooker arranged for both Darwin's and Wallace's theories to be presented to a meeting of the Linnaean Society in 1858. However, Wallace seems to have been onto the idea of evolution over a decade before as this quotation shows.
Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction author. A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, she became in 1995 the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.
