Charles Darwin in his book, On the Origin of Species, presents us with a theory of natural selection. This theory is his attempt at an explanation on how the world and its species came to be the way that we know them now. Darwin writes on how through a process of millions of years, through the effects of man and the effects of nature, species have had a trial and error experiment ongoing. It is through these trials that the natural world has developed beneficial anomalies that at times seem too great to be the work of chance. Darwin writes on how a species will adapt to its surrounding given enough time. When an animal gains a genetic edge over its competitors, be they of the same species or of another genus altogether, the animal …show more content…

Why would nature have seen it fit to not only create these unfortunate slaves but to find them important enough to keep? Darwin attacks this question a little more effectively, I feel, than he did in the latter segment. His argument in this case seems stronger, perhaps because he has more scientific evidence than he had at his disposal on other topics.
Darwin uses the example of the neuter worker ants. His reasoning for the neuter gender, on the surface, is much the same as the reasoning for all of the arguments presented to him. He says that he can find neuter insects explicable if "…such insects had been social, and it had been profitable to the community that a number should have been annually born capable of work, but incapable of procreation [He] can see no very great difficulty in this being affected by natural selection." (p. 236) This is not the end for this argument though. Darwin then puts forth the question, that if a creature is neuter, how does it pass along to its progeny the variations it has acquired. The easy and correct answer is that it doesn't. Then how can this be answered by natural selection? Moreover, how can the neuter variant have been passed along and slowly adapted over the ages?
It is in defense of this line of questioning that Darwin truly shines. He states that the