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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: long appeared to me to present a case of very great difficulty under this
point of view; but I have been enabled, by a fortunate chance, elsewhere to
prove that two individuals, though both are self-fertilising
hermaphrodites, do sometimes cross.
It must have struck most naturalists as a strange anomaly that, in the case
of both animals and plants, species of the same family and even of the same
genus, though agreeing closely with each other in almost their whole
organisation, yet are not rarely, some of them hermaphrodites, and some of
them unisexual. But if, in fact, all hermaphrodites do occasionally
intercross with other individuals, the difference between hermaphrodites
and unisexual species, as far as function is concerned, becomes very small.
On the Origin of Species |
