What evidence, when Darwin/Wallace began work made them think of evolution?

Hello, i am taking an Evolutionary science class and need to make a presentation on the following topic,"What was the evidence that was accumulating when Darwin and Wallace began their work that led them to start thinking about evolution?"I will be checking this forum regularly and hope some one can help me with this. All replies are greatly appreciated, thank you guys.

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Birds...

Lots of people here will be glad to help but we are less inclined to do the homework for you.You should start off by posting what you've learned so far.As a hint of where to start: neither were the first to think of it. By their time it was obvious that evolution had happened. What they came up with was an explanation of how it happened.

I suggest that you need to look at the work of

• Georges-Louis Leclerc
• Charles Bonnet
• Jean Baptiste Lamarck
• Linnaeus

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Well, I'm just watching a repeat of 'Galapogas" on BBC. He was reading Lyell's 'Principles of Geology' on the voyage there...

i have done some research and i know a lot about Darwin's finches and the studies the Grants have done. I don't know much though about the foundaiton and early relationship of Darwin and Wallace, can anyone help out?

You should also look at the work of James Burnett as well as Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Hi,I suggest you read the first four or five chapters of "Evolution: the history of an idea" by Peter Bowler. The contents list is available hereGood luck

If you can get hold of a copy of "The Voyage of the Beagle" (your local, school or college libraries should have it), you can see the thought processes that led to Darwin's thoughts spreading out through it.Also, remember, that special change wasn't a new idea; think of Lamark.

So far, no one has mentioned Malthus.Or pidgeon breeding (although I'm not certain whether pidgeon breeding was an inspiration, or an illustrative example used after the theory was developed).

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"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

Hi Mage,You've been given some good hints as to where to look for more information. My additional suggestion would be to research the topic of biogeography. Both Wallace and Darwin based a lot of their later theorizing on observations of the similarities and differences between geographically-related species (c.f. the Wallace Line, etc). They were both looking for answers to questions such as "Why are there tigers on Bali but not Lombok?". Darwin saw it in his barnacles and orchids (as well as a later rethinking of what he saw on his voyage, not only in the Galapagos), and Wallace tumbled to the idea after long sojourns collecting in the Amazon and Indonesia.If you can get access to JSTOR articles from your school library computer, try finding Camerini JR, 1993, "Evolution, Biogeography and Maps: An Early History of Wallace's Line", Isis, 84:700-727. It has a very good discussion of the faunal observations both Darwin and Wallace made that were (at least in Wallace's case), formulative in developing the theory of natural selection.

Shoot, just read the first few chapters of On the Origin of Species. Darwin tells you exactly what led him to postulate evolution. It was the great difficulty of confining any living thing to a subspecies, species, or genus. One of his major points was doves, that he knew were all descended from Rock Pigeons, but there were so many breeds of doves, that he said he'd classify them into at least three genera and eight species if he and all other naturalists weren't aware they were all descended from Rock Pigeons.Therefore, if Rock Pigeons can produce offspring so diverse in 4,000 years that they qualify as three separate genera, who's to say that some older offspring couldn't produce separate families, orders, or even phyla?That's what Darwin himself said led him to postulate evolution.By the way, the doves were just one example. He had many example from both plants and animals, where he asked, "Were these subspecies all descended from one species? Were these difficult to classify species all descended from one species, or were they created separately?" In the end, he devised both regular experiments and thought experiments to explore that question and came to the conclusion that all species, plant or animal, were probably descended from one or a handful of original species.

Oh, and Origin of Species can be read at: literature.org. You can also find Voyage of the Beagle at that web site.

Well, Darwin was not really original in his theory, just the most successful in his craft. He no doubt drew some of his inferences from Lamarck and from his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.What really began to get his wheels turning was probably when the HMS Beagle landed on the Galapagos island chain. He made notations on how the finch and iguana population was different from each island and from other previous places in South America. He surmised that selective pressures, mutations, (what he called, 'variations'), played key roles in the differences.And then somehow from this logic he came to the grand notion that all plants and animals share a common ancestor.