In the modern industrial communities... the apparatus of living has grown so elaborate and cumbrous... that the consumers of these things cannot make… - Thorstein Veblen

[H]ere and now, as always and everywhere, invention is the mother of necessity.

The machine process pervades the modern life and dominates it in a mechanical sense. Its dominance is seen in the enforcement of precise mechanical measurements and adjustment and the reduction of all manner of things, purposes and acts, necessities, conveniences, and amenities of life, to standard units.

Without much preliminary exposition and without feeling himself to be out of touch with his contemporaries, Darwin set to work to explain species in terms of the process out of which they have arisen, rather than out of the prime cause to which the distinction between them may he due.