Sunday, November 9, 2014

My Year of Darwin 11/09/2014: perhaps some circularity in one of Darwin's laws

 Charles Darwin

"Specific characters - that is, the characters which have come to differ since the several species of the same genus branched off from a common parent - are more variable than generic characters, or those which have long been inherited." Charles Darwin, Origin of Species 1st edition (on Kindle)

This is from the summary of "Laws of Variation." I'm still on my first coffee but it strikes me that characters that are the same are used to unite organisms into the same genus. Not sure you'd ever define a genus by uniting organisms on a character that varies. 



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