Thursday, August 28, 2014

Historical Influences on Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace had the most influence over Darwin’s development of his Natural selection theory because Wallace and Darwin were working at the same theory and they both came up with the same conclusion. Wallace was one of the scientists who came up with the conclusion of Natural selection, but he did not get the credit for it because Darwin published his theory before him.
        
         Alfred Russel Wallace was born in the poor family, therefore he has to work hard to go around the world and work on his theories. He is best known for independently considering the theory of evolution through natural selection. Wallace’s paper on the natural selection was jointly published with some of the Charles Darwin’s writings. Later, Wallace’s paper prompted Darwin to publish his own ideas in On the Origin of Species. Wallace is also known as a “father of biogeography” because he helped others by discovering a hypothesis on how natural selection produce new biological species.

From the bullet point, the most directly affected by Darwin’s work was “If the environment changes, the traits that are helpful or adaptive to that environment will be different.” He concludes that the individuals with heritable traits better suited to the environment will survive. For example, imagine a population of green and brown color beetles. There are more brown beetles and few green beetles. Day by day, green beetles are dying, so the chances are that the surviving brown beetles are going to have brown baby beetles because this trait has a genetic basis. The end result gave us all the population in brown beetles.

        I think Darwin could not have developed his theory of natural selection without the influence and ideas of Wallace because Wallace encouraged him to publish his theory of Natural selection where he gets his first and big success.  Wallace sent letters to Darwin to show him the progress of theory of natural selection. Darwin got scared that Wallace and he came up with the same conclusion. To get full credit, Darwin published his theory before Wallace. But Wallace got the title of co-founder of the theory of Natural selection.

        Before Darwin published “The Origin of Species,” the attitude of Catholic Church during that time was impartial. After the “The Origin of Species” was published, the attitude from the church was negative. Darwin went against the religion by going against the idea of everything was created by God. During this time, Darwin had some problem to published his book, but he was scared of Wallace will get all the credit of the theory of natural selection. Therefore, indirectly Wallace influence him to publish his book “On the Origin of Species.”

       


http://darwin200.christs.cam.ac.uk/pages/index.php?page_id=d8

1 comment:

  1. "...he did not get the credit for it because Darwin published his theory before him. "

    No. I notice that you are using the same source as another student who arrived at this similarly incorrect conclusion, so it sounds like it is a bad source.

    Darwin had already been working on his theory for 20 years before Wallace sent him his theory. There was no stealing involved. Wallace and Darwin collaborated and ended up publishing the paper jointly, with both claiming credit. Darwin went on to publish his book and Wallace continued his research. That was the extent of it. It is true that Darwin is remembered for the theory more so than Wallace, but that is not the fault of Darwin's actions.

    This is a better source to understand the relationship between Darwin and Wallace: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/history_14

    I agree with your choice of bullet point, but when you think about it, don't all bullet points apply to Wallace?

    Again, for your third paragraph, understand that this doesn't reflect what actually happened. Here is a link to the papers presented jointly by Darwin and Wallace: http://www.plantsystematics.org/reveal/pbio/darwin/darwindex.html

    Perhaps the most important influence of Wallace was to provide the impetus to finally get Darwin to publish his work, albeit it jointly with Wallace, with his book being published shortly thereafter.

    The church in question was the Church of England, not the Catholic Church. What "problems" might Darwin have had in publishing his book? Why did he delay more than 20 years? What concerns did he have, other than that the theory sound and accurate?

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