“This monumental volume was greeted initially with both effusive praise and vicious criticism, as scientists and churchmen took sides over the issue of the Creation. Regarding the reception of Origin of Species, archaeologist Brian Fagan, in his textbook Men of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory, writes: “Darwin even speculated that all life, including both plants and animals, might ultimately have come from a common ancestor.” In his book The Making of Mankind, Richard Leakey reports: In addition,Darwin proposed the idea of common descent: that is, all mammals, for example,share a common ancestor, and so on for all categories of living things. In Origin of Species, Darwin viewed the living world as continuously changing with species gradually evolving into new species and other species becoming extinct. It sold out its initial printing on the first day and was reissued in six revised English editions and eight foreign translations during Darwin’s lifetime.” “ Origin of Species offered a new way of looking at life, and reached audiences far beyond the scientific community. In 1859, Darwin published his book, Origin of Species. This conclusion would then be refined into a theory of natural selection which implies that the accumulation of favorable variations over a long period of time results in the emergence of new species and the extinction of old species. Based on these observations, Darwin put forth the idea that those individuals which had the most favorable variations would have the best chance at survival and reproduction. And finally, individuals in any population differ in various features and are, therefore, not exactly alike. Second, in spite of this prolific rate of reproduction, the population of any living creature remains constant over long periods of time. First, all living things tend to increase their numbers at a prolific rate. With traditional faith in a single creation and the permanent endurance of species shattered, the search was on to discover more types of past life.”Ĭharles Darwin made three basic observations. There was simply no place where the newly appearing species could have migrated from: they must truly be new. “…by the 1820s the conclusion became increasingly inescapable: New species both appeared and disappeared over time. In his book Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Idea, Edward Larson reports: Among those who were looking at evolution at this time were: Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the grandfather of Charles Darwin, and Francis Galton French scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon (1707-1787) who rejected Christianity and looked for a different explanation for the origin of the Earth and its inhabitants Paul Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach (1723-1789) who rejected the idea of supernatural origins and, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829) who saw new species emerging through spontaneous generation. While it is common to credit Charles Darwin with inventing or discovering the concept of evolution, many natural philosophers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were already talking about this concept. In July, 1858, the Linnean Society gathered at its new headquarters in London to hear two papers by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in which they jointly announced a theory of evolution by natural selection. The solution to Darwin’s fears was put together by Lyell: a joint presentation of the two works at the Linnean Society of London. “Wallace was a brilliant synthesizer of masses of biological data into a few core principles that revolutionized ecology, biogeography, and evolutionary theory.” In his book The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies-How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths, Michael Shermer writes: Initially, Darwin was devasted, writing: “All my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed.” Darwin was amazed by the manuscript as Wallace’s concepts of evolution by natural selection were nearly the same as his own. Wallace asked Darwin to show the manuscript to Charles Lyell, one of England’s leading scientists, if it was felt to be important. He wrote On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type and sent the manuscript to Darwin. In 1858, while collecting on the island of Ternate, he came up with the idea of evolution by natural selection. In 1855, while collecting specimens in Sarawak, northern Borneo, Wallace wrote On the Law Which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species. Alfred Russel Wallace was a professional collector: in the nineteenth century he travelled to exotic places, collected great numbers of different specimens, and brought them back to England to be sold.
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