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. While it is common to credit Charles Darwin with inventing or discovering the concept of evolution, many natural philosophers (as scientists were once called) of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were already talking about this concept. 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.
In his book Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Idea, Edward Larson reports:
“…by the 1820s the conclusion became increasingly inescapable: New species both appeared and disappeared over time. There was simply no place where the newly appearing species could have migrated from: they must truly be new. 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.”
Charles Darwin made three basic observations. First, all living things tend to increase their numbers at a prolific rate. Second, in spite of this prolific rate of reproduction, the population of any living creature remains constant over long periods of time. And finally, individuals in any population differ in various features and are, therefore, not exactly alike. 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. This conclusion would then be refined into a theory of natural selection which implies that the accumulation of favorable variations of a long period of time results in the emergence of new species and the extinction of old species.
In 1859, Darwin published his book, Origin of Species. Edward Larson reports:
“Origin of Species offered a new way of looking at life, and reached audiences far beyond the scientific community. 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.”
Regarding the reception of Origin of Species, archaeologist Brian Fagan, in his textbook Men of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory, writes:
“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. But gradually the echoes of controversy died away as Darwin’s revolutionary theories were bolstered by more and more field observations.”
James Moore, in his biography of Charles Darwin in The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, writes:
“In an age when science and society were founded on creationist beliefs, Charles Darwin solved the ‘mystery of mysteries’ of his day: namely, how living species originate. He abandoned the Bible as an authority on creation and explained the origin of species by divinely ordained natural laws.”
In his book The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, Richard Dawkins writes:
“Darwin’s answer to the question of the origin of species was, in a general sense, that species descended from other species. Moreover, the family tree of life is a branching one, which means that more than one modern species can be traced back to one ancestral one.”
Within just a few years after the publication of Origin of Species, Darwin’s concept of natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism was accepted by most scientists.
Since the publication of Origin of Species, Darwin’s ideas about natural selection have been widely debated and challenged. However, as new data, new observations, and new scientific methods emerged during the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, Darwin’s basic hypothesis has not been overturned. In his book Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Idea, Edward Larson reports:
“The subsequent accumulation of facts and observations from branches of biology cemented this theory into a virtual law of science.”
In 1871, Charles Darwin followed up his successful Origin of Species with Descent of Man. James Moore writes:
“In his long-awaited Descent of Man (1871), Darwin saw humans evolving physically by natural selection, and then intellectually and morally through the inherited traits of habit, education, and religious instruction.”
Charles Darwin did not discover or invent evolution, but rather his contribution to the theory of evolution was how it worked. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, working independently, arrived at the conclusion that the driving force behind evolution was natural selection. Both Darwin and Wallace had been inspired by the ideas of the mathematician and theologian Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) who had written about overpopulation. Edward Larson writes:
“Applied to plants and animals in nature, Darwin and Wallace independently realized, Malthusian population limits provided a means to generate new species from preexisting ones through the survival of individuals with beneficial variations.”
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