What is "deviations"

Usage examples of "deviations".

Let it be also conceded that small deviations from the antecedent colouring or form would tend to make some of their ancestors escape destruction, by causing them more or less frequently to be passed over or mistaken by their persecutors.

But the number and diversity of inheritable deviations of structure, both those of slight and those of considerable physiological importance, is endless.

Thus, despite the efforts of the astrophysicists, the columns of light underwent deviations, often wandering as far afield as the Roembden Crater.

You carry in your bosom the magnet of constancy, and I, in spite of apparent deviations, declare to you that I have never ceased to be sensible of the attraction.

Some of our highest and ablest men, men of real genius, have during their earliest days laboured under deviations as great as, or even greater than forty-five minutes: and the loss of their precious lives would have been an irreparable injury to the State.

If strange and rare deviations of structure are truly inherited, less strange and commoner deviations may be freely admitted to be inheritable.

If it could be shown that our domestic varieties manifested a strong tendency to reversion,--that is, to lose their acquired characters, whilst kept under unchanged conditions, and whilst kept in a considerable body, so that free intercrossing might check, by blending together, any slight deviations of structure, in such case, I grant that we could deduce nothing from domestic varieties in regard to species.

Many slight differences might, and indeed do now, arise amongst pigeons, which are rejected as faults or deviations from the standard of perfection of each breed.

Thus I can understand how a flower and a bee might slowly become, either simultaneously or one after the other, modified and adapted in the most perfect manner to each other, by the continued preservation of individuals presenting mutual and slightly favourable deviations of structure.

Some authors believe it to be as much the function of the reproductive system to produce individual differences, or very slight deviations of structure, as to make the child like its parents.

But the much greater variability, as well as the greater frequency of monstrosities, under domestication or cultivation, than under nature, leads me to believe that deviations of structure are in some way due to the nature of the conditions of life, to which the parents and their more remote ancestors have been exposed during several generations.

I will here only add that their variability seems to be owing to their uselessness, and therefore to natural selection having no power to check deviations in their structure.