• Darwin was influenced by the work of many researchers who came before him. The
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• Darwin was influenced by the work of many researchers who came before him. These are a few of them and some of the concepts they established and/or popularized: - Robert Chambers à principle of progressive development - Georges Cuvier-comparative anatomy; extinction - Jean-Baptiste Lamarck-inheritance of acquired characteristics - Carl Linnaeus-binomial classification system - Charles Lyell-uniformitarianism - Thomas Malthus- population checks - William Paley- fit of organism to environment... Choose three (3) of the people from the list above and describe specifically how each of them fueled Darwin’s thinking --- i.e. How did the works of these three people contribute to Darwin’s conceptualization of his “two fundamental insights”? In your opinion, which of these three people had the most influence on Darwin and why?
Explanation / Answer
2. Charles Lyell was a well-known English geologist. Darwin took Lyell's book, Principles of Geology, with him on the Beagle. In the book, Lyell argued that gradual geological processes have gradually shaped Earth’s surface. From this, Lyell inferred that Earth must be far older than most people believed.
3. Charles Darwin was influenced by Thomas Robert Malthus, a late-eighteenth-century economist. Malthus wrote, "Essay on the Principle of Population" (1798), which Darwin read and was inspired by. The central theme of Malthus' work was that population growth would always overpower food supply growth, creating perpetual states of hunger, disease, and struggle. The natural, ever-present struggle for survival caught the attention of Darwin, and he extended Malthus' principle to the evolutionary scheme. Darwin considered that some of the competitors in Malthus' perpetual struggle would be better equipped to survive. Those that were less able would die out, leaving only those with the more desirable traits. Through his research, Darwin concluded that this ongoing struggle between those more and less fit to survive would produce a never-ending progression of changes in the organism. In its simplest form, this is evolution through natural selection. Darwin had many other sources from which he developed his theory. Yet, if evolution was the machine, and natural selection was the engine, then Malthus' perpetual struggle for resources was the fuel. Prior to contemplating "Population," Darwin believed that populations grew until they were aligned with existing resources, and then stabilized.
Thomas Malthus' work helped inspire Darwin to refine natural selection by stating a reason for meaningful competition between members of the same species.
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