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Author | Topic: What evidence, when Darwin/Wallace began work made them think of evolution? | |||||||||||||||||||
Chiroptera Inactive Member |
Damn. I forgot the barnacles.
Darwin was an expert on the taxonomy of barnacles. He spent years and years dissecting and classifying barnacles. If you wanted to know anything about barnacles in the middle of the 19th century, Darwin was the go-to guy. I think I remember reading Moore and Desmond's biography (before they added the awful subtitle) where Darwin was fascinated when he discovered that what were thought to be hermaphrodite species were actually a female with a very tiny male living as a parasite -- and that there were "intermediate forms" between species with this full-blown parasitism and species where more-or-less fully developed males were merely living in the same shell as the female. Or something like that -- maybe I need to read the book again. "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw
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Chiroptera Inactive Member |
quote: Few famous scientists were completely original in the work they produced. Darwin was no more nor no less original than anyone else whose theories resulted in a profound paradigm shift. What Darwin did do was use the idea of natural selection of naturally occurring variations to explain various different phenomena in biology, from anatomy to taxonomy to biogeography. He also spent a great deal of his life collecting a wealth of data to support his theory; I don't know how many people have read Origin of Species or Descent of Man; those books are almost boring in that they are very detailed observations of phenomena that support his theory -- it is only the beautiful writing style of 19th century authors that keep the books at all readable. He also produce several other books and many monographs also detailing evidence to support his theory of natural selection of naturally occurring variations. "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw
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RickJB Member (Idle past 5010 days) Posts: 917 From: London, UK Joined: |
nj writes: And then somehow from this logic he came to the grand notion that all plants and animals share a common ancestor. Why not read Darwin's The Origin Of Species and find out how? Using your own ignorance as scorn just makes you look ignorant! Edited by RickJB, : No reason given.
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Taz Member (Idle past 3311 days) Posts: 5069 From: Zerus Joined: |
Chiroptera writes:
I quite disagree with this notion. I thought it could have been a lot more readable if it had be more direct.
...it is only the beautiful writing style of 19th century authors that keep the books at all readable.
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Archer Opteryx Member (Idle past 3618 days) Posts: 1811 From: East Asia Joined: |
RickJB writes: Why not read Darwin's The Origin of Species and find out how? Now it's easier than ever to do. Darwin's complete works will soon be online. BBC BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Charles Darwin's works go online
Thanks to Cambridge University for making this resource available to the public. . Edited by Archer Opterix, : Added portrait. Archer All species are transitional.
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macaroniandcheese  Suspended Member (Idle past 3948 days) Posts: 4258 Joined: |
oh god malthus.
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bgmark2 Member (Idle past 6178 days) Posts: 18 Joined: |
Is interesting about the barnicals...wouldn't have tought there would have been great demand for experts in barnicals in the middel of the eigteenth century...
What about coconuts? |
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Ihategod Member (Idle past 6050 days) Posts: 235 Joined: |
Magecraft writes:
"What was the evidence that was accumulating when Darwin and Wallace began their work that led them to start thinking about evolution?" yeah, what was the evidence that was accumulating? I read that it was obvious but I don't understand what was obvious. Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Fix quote box by replacing the closing "/quote" with "/qs".
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nator Member (Idle past 2190 days) Posts: 12961 From: Ann Arbor Joined: |
quote: That's a good question. Darwin certainly built upon a number of ideas of other naturalists of the time. The following observations of Darwin and his predecessors are what we would call "Darwinism". Please note that Darwinism preceeds the discovery of DNA and the role it plays in heredity. This aspect of evolution was yet to be understood at the level it is today, but Genetics served to confirm predictions based upon a "purely" Darwinian model. The marriage of Darwinism and Genetics is known as The Modern Synthesis. If you would like to understand this subject more fully, I suggest reading the entire article here.
1. Transmutationism (also called by Darwin "Descent with Modification"). This word means in context that species change ("mutate", from the Latin) from one species to another. It is in opposition to the prevailing Aristotelian views that species were natural kinds that were eternal.
2. Common descent. This is the view (not held by all evolutionists prior to Darwin or even after) that similar species with similar structures (homologies) were similar because they were descended from a common ancestor. Darwin tended to present the cases for limited common descent - i.e., of mammals or birds - but extended the argument to the view that all life arises from a common ancestor or small set of common ancestors. 3. Struggle for existence. This is the view that more organisms are born than can survive. Consequently, most of those zygotes that are fertilised will die, and of those that reach partition (birth) many will either die or not be able to reproduce. The competition here is against the environment, which includes other species (predators and organisms that use the same food and other resources). This is interspecific (between species) competition. 4. Natural selection. This is a complex view that species naturally have a spread of variations, and that variants that confer an advantage on the bearer organisms, and are hereditable, will reproduce more frequently than competitors, and change the "shape" of the species overall. Notice here that this competition is mostly intraspecific, i.e., between members of the same species (and indeed of the same population). 5. Sexual selection. Many features of organisms are obvious hindrances (such as the tails of birds of paradise), and these often occur in one sex only. Darwin argued that there was competition for mating opportunities and any feature that initially marked a gender out as a good mating opportunity would become exaggerated by the mating choices of the opposite gender. Competition here is between conspecifics of the same gender. 6. Biogeographic distribution. Darwin and Wallace were concerned to explain why species were found in the areas they were, and argued that dispersal of similar, but related, species was due to their evolution in one place and migration into other regions. 7. Heredity. Darwin knew very little about what we would call the principles of genetics. He accepted the prevailing and old view that the use of features of the organism would change the way those features were inherited.
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Percy Member Posts: 22479 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.7 |
Vashgun writes: Magecraft writes:
yeah, what was the evidence that was accumulating? I read that it was obvious but I don't understand what was obvious.
"What was the evidence that was accumulating when Darwin and Wallace began their work that led them to start thinking about evolution?" Keep in mind that you're asking about the evidence that was accumulating when Darwin and Wallace began their work, not the evidence that they gathered after they began their work. A perhaps better way to phrase the question is to ask is why naturalists of the period leading up to Darwin already accepted evolution. The great naturalist Lamarck, who was already in the ground before Darwin ever set foot on the Beagle, developed his own theory of evolution that held that acquired characteristics could be passed on to progeny. Pre-Darwin naturalists accepted that evolution had happened, though they didn't know how, because of the fossil record and the gradually increasing realization, as more and more lifeforms were classified according the Linnaean system, that existing lifeforms were interrelated. --Percy Edited by Percy, : Grammar.
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Brad McFall Member (Idle past 5053 days) Posts: 3428 From: Ithaca,NY, USA Joined: |
I guess from what Darwin said, if there was anything obvious it would have had then to have been, whatever causally modified and adapted the variously shaped individuals to their several conditions and formatted their correlations to their stations formally mode by mode (e.g. without doubtable dispute back then at least while comparing two quantities) no matter what later came be called a mutation.
Darwin wrote,quote:(bold added from On Natural Selection p 68-69 Penguin Books 2005 extracted from Darwin’s Origin of Species 1859 ) So...before getting to the difficulties on theory and the evidentiary chapters, Darwin presented what he doubted would not be disptued and expected to be judged reflectively and evidentially in the tone he presented later. This timbre, tenor, and potential plausibility needs to be determined and critiqued between his use of "number" and "form" he held in a sense to not beopen to much doubt back then, back in the beggining. It can be done but requires, on the balane, one to be clear bout the area bow of the savages' apparent ship turned. It was not a mere island. Edited by Brad McFall, : grammer
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MartinV  Suspended Member (Idle past 5848 days) Posts: 502 From: Slovakia, Bratislava Joined: |
Hi Brad.
You know my opinion about darwinism and especially about "natural selection". I suppose I have given very good evidence now at the thread about "Mimicry, please help me underestand how" http://EvC Forum: Mimicry: Please help me understand how -->EvC Forum: Mimicry: Please help me understand how Last time I mentioned Heikertinger who dismissed "natural selection" you said that lysenkoism is probably no answer to the issue of evolution. You have mentioned it because I have written that the last work of Franz Heikertinger "Das Raetsel der Mimikry un seine Loesung - Eine kritische Darstellung des Werdens, des Wesens und der Wiederlegung der Tiertrachthypothesen, Jena 1954" was published in East Germany (btw Jena where Haeckel teached). The fact is very interesting, because entomologist Heikertinger lived in Vienna and spent more than 40 years exploring mimicry there and he came very early to the interesting conclusion that mimicry doesn't exist. All his work is nothing else as refuting darwinian concept of mimicry and especially of "natural selection" as source of it. I have read the opinion that it is some kind of Viena's nihilism as represented in those times by some famous Vienna philosophers.. Anyway Heikertinger seems to be a systematic from the past times with vast knowledge of insects families and their species. Consequently he refuted many cases of so called mimicry as the pure coincidence of resemblance of transformational sequences. His idea that ant mimics are nothing else that pure coincidence is supported by the fact that there are many ant-like beetles living in caverns and he called those species "kavernikoles". But I think that anti-darwinian thinking in Central Europe has it's source in different kind of more complex thinking probably going back to Italian Rennaissance. So the Darwin's thoughts has been transformed here to some kind of more complex theory of life. Perhaps Darwins original thoughts are here not as dismissed by opponents of darwinism as their neodarwinian transformation into concepts of "selfish gene" etc. At leat the work of prominent anti-neodarwinian biologist professor Zdenek Neubauer from Charles Univ. Prague seems to support such an idea. --- btw. could Kant be marked as a Cetral-European philosopher? Edited by MartinV, : No reason given.
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