Natural Selection is also credited with the power of slowly effecting unlimited metamorphoses: it is believed that every advantage is transmitted by heredity, and strengthened in the course of generations (when heredity is known to be so capricious that ...); the happy adaptations of certain creatures to very special conditions of life, are regarded as the result of surrounding influences. Nowhere, however, are examples of unconscious selection to be found (absolutely nowhere). The most different individuals associate one with the other; the extremes become lost in the mass. Each vies with the other to maintain his kind; those creatures whose appearance shields them from certain dangers, do not alter this appearance when they are in an environment quite devoid of danger.... If they live in places where their coats or their hides do not conceal them, they do not adapt themselves to their surroundings in any way.
The selection of the most beautiful has been so exaggerated, that it greatly exceeds the instincts for beauty in our own race! As a matter of fact, the most beautiful creature often couples with the most debased, and the largest with the smallest. We almost always see males and females taking advantage of their first chance meeting, and manifesting no taste or selectiveness at all.—Modification through climate and nourishment—but as a matter of fact unimportant.
There are no intermediate forms.—
The growing evolution of creatures is assumed. All grounds for this assumption are entirely lacking. Every type has its limitations: beyond these evolution cannot carry it.
My general point of view. First proposition: Man as a species is not progressing. Higher specimens are indeed attained; but they do not survive. The general level of the species is not raised.
Second proposition: Man as a species does not represent any sort of progress compared with any other animal. The whole of the animal and plant world does not develop from the lower to the higher.... but all simultaneously, haphazardly, confusedly, and at variance. The richest and most complex forms—and the term "higher type" means no more than this—perish more easily: only the lowest succeed in maintaining their apparent imperishableness. The former are seldom attained, and maintain their superior position with difficulty, the latter are compensated by great fruitfulness.—In the human race, also, the superior specimens, the happy cases of evolution, are the first to perish amid the fluctuations of chances for and against them. They are exposed to every form of decadence: they are extreme, and, on that account alone, already decadents.... The short duration of beauty, of genius, of the Cæsar, is sui generis: such things are not hereditary. The type is inherited, there is nothing extreme or particularly "happy" about a type——It is not a case of a particular fate, or of the "evil will" of Nature, but merely of the concept "superior type": the higher type is an example of an incomparably greater degree of complexity a greater sum of co-ordinated elements: but on this account disintegration becomes a thousand times more threatening. "Genius" is the sublimest machine in existence—hence it is the most fragile.
Third propositio:: The domestication (culture) of man does not sink very deep. When it does sink far below the skin it immediately becomes degeneration (type: the Christian). The wild man (or, in moral terminology, the evil man) is a reversion to Nature—and, in a certain sense, he represents a recovery, a cure from the effects of "culture." ...
685.
Anti-Darwin.—What surprises me most on making a general survey of the great destinies of man, is that I invariably see the reverse of what to-day Darwin and his school sees or will persist in seeing: selection in favour of the stronger, the better-constituted, and the progress of the species. Precisely the reverse of this stares one in the face: the suppression of the lucky cases, the uselessness of the more highly constituted types, the inevitable mastery of the mediocre, and even of those who are below mediocrity. Unless we are shown some reason why man is an exception among living creatures, I incline to the belief that Darwin's school is everywhere at fault. That will to power, in which I perceive the ultimate reason and character of all change, explains why it is that selection is never in favour of the exceptions and of the lucky cases: the strongest and happiest natures are weak when they are confronted with a majority ruled by organised gregarious instincts and the fear which possesses the weak. My general view of the world of values shows that in the highest values which now sway the destiny of man, the happy cases among men, the select specimens do not prevail: but rather the decadent specimens,—perhaps there is nothing more interesting in the world than this unpleasant spectacle....