Darwin recognized that heritable variation in individuals was the key to evolution through natural selection. The “conditions of life” as Darwin called it, were the natural processes that selected which variations would be successfully passed on to the next generation.
Darwin’s ideas about selection have often been misrepresented as invoking chance, and evolution portrayed as a random process. Nothing could be further from the truth. Darwin addresses this in the first paragraph of Chapter 5, stating that viewing variation as due to chance is “wholly incorrect but serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation.”
Darwin formed his ideas about natural selection before the discovery of what we now realize is the genetic basis for variation; research in the 150 years since publication of the Origin largely confirm Darwin’s hypotheses.
image: http://www.anselm.edu/homepage/jpitocch/genbio/mitosisnot.html
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