Charles Darwin didn't originate the idea of evolution.

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06 Oct 2020, 11:39 am

The idea of evolution in biology existed and had been observed long before Darwin was ever conceived. What Darwin did was create a theory as to how it occurs. He wasn't the first person to believe that organisms evolve.

Likewise Isaac Newton did not originate the idea of gravity. He just explained it.



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06 Oct 2020, 1:17 pm

I dont know about Newton, but yes that is true that the notion that life evolved over time even crops up even in ancient mythologies of different cultures. Modern European scientist began suggesting the idea in the 1700s, including Darwin's own granddad, Erasmus Darwin in the 1790s. But what Darwin contributed was a mechanism that drove evolution: natural selection. There were notions before that be no had come up with a really good explanation for what caused evolution.

Also folks dont realize that actual scientists had already abandoned the notion that the Earth was only six thousand years at least a century before Darwin because they knew about geological strata that contained extinct organisms. They had already pretty much accepted the idea of "gradualism" - slow gradual change over time (ie "evolution") in the realm of geology. They knew that it took millions of years for mountains erode down.



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06 Oct 2020, 4:02 pm

Agreed, except...Alfred Wallace came up with basic points of Darwin's theory independently of Darwin, even "fed" him some of the ideas. They were contemporaries. I believe the information was presented to the Royal Society (can't remember the exact name of the scientific society) under both names. But Darwin had better connections; it is he who is remembered. Wallace's books are fascinating reading.


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08 Oct 2020, 3:52 pm

blazingstar wrote:
Agreed, except...Alfred Wallace came up with basic points of Darwin's theory independently of Darwin, even "fed" him some of the ideas. They were contemporaries. I believe the information was presented to the Royal Society (can't remember the exact name of the scientific society) under both names. But Darwin had better connections; it is he who is remembered. Wallace's books are fascinating reading.


I have a copy of "The Malay Archipelago", which is utterly brilliant but doesn't go much into the theory of natural selection. Would love to track down some of his other books.

As I've heard it, Wallace and Darwin were regular correspondants. One day Wallace wrote about this idea he'd just had, which was exactly the same idea that Darwin had spent the past 25 years slowly building the case for, unwilling to publish til it was watertight. They discussed it, and both agreed to put out their first articles on Natural Selection around the same time. But Darwin was the one with a book nearing completion. And Wallace seems to have deferred to Darwin's age and reputation. Class may also have been a factor in their reception: Darwin was upper-middle class, living on inherited money, while Wallace came from a poorer background and earned a living acquiring specimens for wealthy collectors.


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08 Oct 2020, 6:52 pm

You have refreshed my memories on the details.

I do recall the impression that Wallace provided a key point. Wallace looked up to Darwin and wrote extensively about his ideas.

If Wallace had not done his work and written to Darwin, I wonder if Darwin would ever have gotten around to publishing? :D :D :D


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20 Oct 2020, 8:16 am

I find it interesting that a discredited earlier version, Lamarckism, may have some truth to it after all.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck thought that changes which happened to organisms in their own lifetimes were inherited by their descendants, and that this was how evolution happened. The classic example was a giraffe that keeps stretching its neck to reach tall trees, as a result of which its offspring have longer necks to start with. Which, obviously, we now know isn't how genetic inheritence works.

But then you get to epigenetics. This is where the genes themselves stay the same, but the organism's life experiences result in long-term chemical changes to how the genes are actually used. For example, the addition of chemical "tags" that block a particular gene from being read. Some of these changes appear to be heritable - it's controversial, but the evidence is starting to lean that way.

The most famous example is the children concieved during and after the Dutch "Hunger Winter" in WWII. Their parents were starved by the Nazi occupiers. The children seem to have inherited a suite of epigenetic changes for surviving hunger, which unfortunately make them prone to obesity and diabetes when there isn't a famine.


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20 Oct 2020, 7:45 pm

Yes, Wallace came up with same idea about the same time as Darwin, of natural selection as the driver of evolution.

Both read Thomas Malthus's book on population growth in humans whose conclusion was that since food production increases arithmetically, but population grows geometrically that starvation is envitable. And both thought to themselves "what if the same is true of plants and animals?". The same catalyst for both.