9 ms·

Another person that discovered evolution besides Darwin

50 points by happy-go-lucky 10y ago

gwbas1c 10y ago
Darwin didn't "discover" evolution. He just happened to collect evidence to support a popular theory. It's been awhile since I read Darwin's book, but he gave a lot of credit to his father at the beginning. From what I remember, evolution was more of his father's theory and Charles was young enough to make the trip, and lucky enough to have a father with deep pockets to pay for it.
- motoboi 10y ago
  The one with theories was his grandfather. His father did not pay for the trip, which was a scientific expedition payed by the British Crown to survey coasts. Darwin was a minor employee in that ship, hired to collect botanical specimen. In other words, Beagle trip was not for Darwin, but he seized the opportunity and, after almost 20 years of work after that, published his book because someone else was close to publish and he needed to claim the discovery by publishing first.
  - mannykannot 10y ago
    While Darwin was formally only a minor employee, if he had any formal position (he was not a naval person), my understanding is that he was primarily there to keep Captain Fitzroy company, in an environment where the combination of social stratification and naval discipline meant that the captain was nominally in a sort of socially-imposed solitary confinement (I wonder how Cook managed on his voyages, but I suspect he was much more flexible than Fitzroy with regards to these matters.) Formally, the ship's surgeon was the expedition's naturalist, as was the practice in those days.
- azakai 10y ago
  That's not quite right. Yes, on the one hand his discovery wasn't from nowhere. But it was still a breakthrough - there were multiple theories of evolution in circulation, but most we now know were simply wrong (e.g. Lamarck's theory of evolution). Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection was not only the sole survivor of those times, but also has stood up til today. It's important we realize that scientific discovery always depends on the work of others ("the shoulders of giants" as the saying goes), but we also have to recognize true breakthroughs as well, and not just say Darwin "collected evidence for a popular theory".
  - ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
    >> but most we now know were simply wrong (e.g. Lamarck's theory of evolution) actually, Lamarck's ideas have made quite a bit of a comeback - epigenetic studies being the prime example. essentially what that's all about is there are DNA-affecting "things" (introduced by things like stress for example) that don't alter the DNA itself but affects how the DNA gets passed on to the offspring. also (even though the scientific community gets all passive aggressive when this subject is brought up) - the truth of the matter is that while adaptation driven by natural selection is definitely "a thing" proven by experiments and observed in nature, the actual speciation driven by natural selection - not so much.
    - azakai 10y ago
      Yes, some other ideas have been shown valid too, in some specific cases, including aspects of Lamarck's thinking. But I think it's worth stressing that the primary force that drives evolution is still very clearly natural selection. Not epigenetics, not genetic drift, not randomness, not "spanners" and other structural mechanisms, etc. It's remarkable that Darwin's idea has stood the test of time for so long. He just got it right. Where other influences exist, they tend to be interesting corner cases. Also worth noting that the main exception to natural selection is sexual selection, which was also introduced by Darwin. We shouldn't over-idolize scientific figures, but Darwin was truly remarkable.
      - ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
        >> But I think it's worth stressing that the primary force that drives evolution is still very clearly natural selection. what makes you so sure of that?
        azakai 10y ago
        Well, it's the universal view in evolutionary biology, in everything I've read and people I've talked to. It's also clearly stated in the opening paragraphs of the wikipedia entry for example [1]. Or were you asking why biologists are so sure? I'm not a biologist, but my understanding is that the evidence for natural selection is simply overwhelming on all levels (archeological, experimental, theoretical, simulations, etc.). Other evolutionary processes have interesting work behind them, but the burden of proof to show they matter as much as natural selection has just not been hit yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
- thearn4 10y ago
  I've always thought that Mendel discovered genetics, but from a practical and experimental side. Darwin's work focused on longer timescales. But I don't know how accurate that summary would be.
  - Noseshine 10y ago
    Here is a short excerpt (5 minutes) of an MIT lecture video that tells you a lot about Mendel and where he came from: https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 The full course is here - I cannot recommend it enough, the professor is pure gold(!): https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-mitx-7-00x-4 https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-... Mendel was brilliant - but actually also a bit unlucky (or lucky?). All the traits he checked in his peas were on different chromosomes. He missed the deeper insights resulting form the confusion when inheritance of traits isn't independent, when genes were located on the same chromosome. That lead to the discovery of more mechanisms of inheritance... the random rearrangement of sections of chromosomes that takes place during meiosis.
  - azakai 10y ago
    Darwin discovered the mechanism of natural selection, "survival of the fittest". That requires traits to be heritable, passed from parents to children. Mendel discovered how that works in practice, and in particular, that it was a discrete mechanism - each gene has a finite number of states.
- qntty 10y ago
  Yeah the title bothered me... >The proposal that one type of organism could descend from another type goes back to some of the first pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, such as Anaximander and Empedocles.[34] Such proposals survived into Roman times. The poet and philosopher Lucretius followed Empedocles in his masterwork De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution#History_of_evolutionary_thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution#History_of_evolution... Darwin described one mechanism (i.e. natural selection) that drives evolution.
  - sageikosa 10y ago
    Natural selection and mutation. The most revolutionary thing wasn't that there was change, but that the changes were effectively "random" change. Randomness and species interrelatedness is what drove (still drives) teleological fanatics absolutely nuts.
  - azakai 10y ago
    To be fair to Darwin, he proposed another mechanism as well, sexual selection. Also, his two mechanisms were revolutionary at the time, and many decades later remain the most important factors in our understanding of evolution. Yes, the general idea of evolution as "species change, rise and fall" is not a new one in Darwin's time. But today when we say "evolution" we basically mean "evolution by natural selection" which is Darwin's novelty.
chriskanan 10y ago
Darwin worked out a theory for how evolution works with supporting evidence. The idea of evolution had been around for a while due to similarities between animals and due to paleontology. But many scientists ridiculed it until Darwin had his convincing theory and evidence. One of the biggest opponents pre-Darwin was Cuvier: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier
- joering2 10y ago
  Any idea where it might be going? Is is possible the evolution pretty much stopped with humans? Someone told me that AI/technology implanted into humans will be next movement for evolution but looking back that's not how evolution evolved no?
  - christophilus 10y ago
    Evolution, by definition, will never stop, so long as there is life. It is the way life works. It doesn't mean progress towards some arbitrary goal, such as intelligence or strength. It means fitness for the current environment. You might argue that the cockroach is one of the most successful products of evolution.
    - azakai 10y ago
      Evolution in the sense that Darwin meant it - natural selection - does depend on some specific details of life. Namely, there must be variation in the species, the variation must be heritable, and there must be something that causes some of the species to produce more offspring. Without one of those, natural selection stops. In theory, life might exist without one of them - if we live forever and stop having children, or if we all have the same amount of children, or if we design our children's genes artificially, etc.
      - svachalek 10y ago
        Who is "we"? All life on earth? Even "we" as humanity is a colony organism; we have more non-human cells in our bodies than human ones.
jaequery 10y ago
In a historic sense, It's quite fascinating to think that we all evolved from just dirt, water, and gas.
skywhopper 10y ago
Darwin came up with a theory of a _mechanism_ (natural selection) by which the evolution that was _observed_ in nature happens. Neither Darwin nor Wallace "discovered" evolution. Evolution is a feature of our world, easily observed and utilized by animal and plant breeders for hundreds of centuries. But what was brilliant about Darwin's theory was that he proposed it while knowing basically nothing about the underlying biological features that enabled it--ie, discrete genes that are duplicated, sometimes with errors, in successive generations of individuals. What blew my mind when I first understood these ideas was that given discrete genes, and given unequal chances of successful reproduction for various sets of genes, natural selection is essentially axiomatic. The rules of the game force natural selection to exist. There is no other way it can work. So I think it's fair to say that Darwin discovered natural selection. But not evolution. By the way if you are interested in this topic at all and you haven't read "On the Origin of Species", do yourself a favor and seek it out. It's public domain so it's available all over the Internet and there are plenty of good printed editions available as well. For its age, it's remarkably clear and concise even for modern readers. It's well-written and the author takes a very humble approach to the topic. As an argument it's a fantastic example of building to your conclusion by step after concrete step of irrefutable evidence. And when Darwin had to get speculative, he was correct an incredibly high percentage of the time, so even his wildest ideas still hold up today.
- ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
  >> The rules of the game force natural selection to exist. There is no other way it can work. care to cite a proven example of speciation caused by natural selection ?
  - laurencerowe 10y ago
    Lenski's famous experiment observed speciation in the lab: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lenski_affair http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lenski_affair
    - mratzloff 10y ago
      Thanks for linking that. Interesting read about an experiment I hadn't heard of.
not_that_noob 10y ago
I didn't know this part - Darwin is a mensch! "Wallace sent his ideas to the English naturalist Charles Darwin, with whom he often exchanged letters. As it happened, Darwin had been working for 20 years on his own theory of natural selection, partly inspired by his 1835 visit to the Galápagos Islands. Darwin had not published his ideas, because he was afraid of a backlash. He quickly realised that Wallace's discoveries matched up with his own, and resolved to take the plunge. He decided to present both their papers at the same time, so that both men would get credit for having independently discovered evolution. In the immediate aftermath, they both became famous. But after Darwin published his book On the origin of species by means of natural selection in 1859, he became known as the man who discovered evolution. Most people forgot about Wallace."
- azakai 10y ago
  > Darwin had not published his ideas, because he was afraid of a backlash. And he had good cause to be worried. Many initial responses were very negative. And although consensus shifted to firm agreement with him, a small but strong opposition exists to this day in multiple forms.
  - Numberwang 10y ago
    Well, mostly one form. The religious one.
    - azakai 10y ago
      The secular opposition is significant as well (as summarized in e.g. Pinker's The Blank Slate [1]). I don't think we can say either the religious or secular one is clearly larger than the other. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - Angostura 10y ago
      Don't forget that Darwin's original destination was going to be to train as a parish priest.
rokhayakebe 10y ago
Reading the first few pages of the "Origin of Species...." it is clear Darwin does not state he discovered evolution. From the onset the first book/chapter is a collection of studies on the subject and scientists who have come to similar conclusions well before him according to him.
abecedarius 10y ago
Darwin and Wallace both thought of natural selection on reading Malthus's essay on the principle of population. I guess that's a reproducible route to the idea -- send a curious British naturalist to South America and some islands, then loan them a copy of Malthus. I'd like to read Malthus myself someday and see how close he came. Darwin did some historical research on his predecessors for a later edition of the Origin. Wallace wasn't the only independent discoverer, though the others did not take it nearly as far. https://historiesofecology.blogspot.com/2013/08/predecessors-of-darwin-and-wallace.html https://historiesofecology.blogspot.com/2013/08/predecessors...
adv9517 10y ago
Whitewashing by the BBC is becoming commonplace in this post-truth era. The article doesn't bother to mention the fact that Wallace was racist, even enabling and documenting the beating of indigenous "workers" during his first trip in South America predating his less violent South East Asian tours. Wallace wrote Can the tropics be permanently colonized by Europeans, and particularly by men of the Anglo-Saxon race? This is the question that now occupies much attention in view of the mad struggle among the chief European Governments for a share of all those parts of tropical Africa and Asia still held by inferior races. http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S562.htm http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S562.htm
jaimebuelta 10y ago
It's important to note that Darwin and Wallace didn´t "discover" evolution, which was already known at the time. Lamarck presented his ideas half a century before Darwin. They came with an explanation on what was the cause for it (natural selection). The theory has been improved and consolidated with the understanding of genetics since then...
- mannykannot 10y ago
  Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (a member of Birmingham's Lunar Society) was a believer in evolution, and even compared it to domestication and hybridization, an analogy that helped Charles develop his theory. Ironically, Charles originally believed in the fixity of species.

Darwin didn't "discover" evolution. He just happened to collect evidence to support a popular theory. It's been awhile since I read Darwin's book, but he gave a lot of credit to his father at the beginning. From what I remember, evolution was more of his father's theory and Charles was young enough to make the trip, and lucky enough to have a father with deep pockets to pay for it.

motoboi 10y ago
The one with theories was his grandfather. His father did not pay for the trip, which was a scientific expedition payed by the British Crown to survey coasts. Darwin was a minor employee in that ship, hired to collect botanical specimen. In other words, Beagle trip was not for Darwin, but he seized the opportunity and, after almost 20 years of work after that, published his book because someone else was close to publish and he needed to claim the discovery by publishing first.
- mannykannot 10y ago
  While Darwin was formally only a minor employee, if he had any formal position (he was not a naval person), my understanding is that he was primarily there to keep Captain Fitzroy company, in an environment where the combination of social stratification and naval discipline meant that the captain was nominally in a sort of socially-imposed solitary confinement (I wonder how Cook managed on his voyages, but I suspect he was much more flexible than Fitzroy with regards to these matters.) Formally, the ship's surgeon was the expedition's naturalist, as was the practice in those days.
azakai 10y ago
That's not quite right. Yes, on the one hand his discovery wasn't from nowhere. But it was still a breakthrough - there were multiple theories of evolution in circulation, but most we now know were simply wrong (e.g. Lamarck's theory of evolution). Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection was not only the sole survivor of those times, but also has stood up til today. It's important we realize that scientific discovery always depends on the work of others ("the shoulders of giants" as the saying goes), but we also have to recognize true breakthroughs as well, and not just say Darwin "collected evidence for a popular theory".
- ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
  >> but most we now know were simply wrong (e.g. Lamarck's theory of evolution) actually, Lamarck's ideas have made quite a bit of a comeback - epigenetic studies being the prime example. essentially what that's all about is there are DNA-affecting "things" (introduced by things like stress for example) that don't alter the DNA itself but affects how the DNA gets passed on to the offspring. also (even though the scientific community gets all passive aggressive when this subject is brought up) - the truth of the matter is that while adaptation driven by natural selection is definitely "a thing" proven by experiments and observed in nature, the actual speciation driven by natural selection - not so much.
  - azakai 10y ago
    Yes, some other ideas have been shown valid too, in some specific cases, including aspects of Lamarck's thinking. But I think it's worth stressing that the primary force that drives evolution is still very clearly natural selection. Not epigenetics, not genetic drift, not randomness, not "spanners" and other structural mechanisms, etc. It's remarkable that Darwin's idea has stood the test of time for so long. He just got it right. Where other influences exist, they tend to be interesting corner cases. Also worth noting that the main exception to natural selection is sexual selection, which was also introduced by Darwin. We shouldn't over-idolize scientific figures, but Darwin was truly remarkable.
    - ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
      >> But I think it's worth stressing that the primary force that drives evolution is still very clearly natural selection. what makes you so sure of that?
      - azakai 10y ago
        Well, it's the universal view in evolutionary biology, in everything I've read and people I've talked to. It's also clearly stated in the opening paragraphs of the wikipedia entry for example [1]. Or were you asking why biologists are so sure? I'm not a biologist, but my understanding is that the evidence for natural selection is simply overwhelming on all levels (archeological, experimental, theoretical, simulations, etc.). Other evolutionary processes have interesting work behind them, but the burden of proof to show they matter as much as natural selection has just not been hit yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection
thearn4 10y ago
I've always thought that Mendel discovered genetics, but from a practical and experimental side. Darwin's work focused on longer timescales. But I don't know how accurate that summary would be.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  Here is a short excerpt (5 minutes) of an MIT lecture video that tells you a lot about Mendel and where he came from: https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 https://youtu.be/D8m-ZEr9qV8?t=276 The full course is here - I cannot recommend it enough, the professor is pure gold(!): https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-mitx-7-00x-4 https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-biology-secret-life-... Mendel was brilliant - but actually also a bit unlucky (or lucky?). All the traits he checked in his peas were on different chromosomes. He missed the deeper insights resulting form the confusion when inheritance of traits isn't independent, when genes were located on the same chromosome. That lead to the discovery of more mechanisms of inheritance... the random rearrangement of sections of chromosomes that takes place during meiosis.
- azakai 10y ago
  Darwin discovered the mechanism of natural selection, "survival of the fittest". That requires traits to be heritable, passed from parents to children. Mendel discovered how that works in practice, and in particular, that it was a discrete mechanism - each gene has a finite number of states.
qntty 10y ago
Yeah the title bothered me... >The proposal that one type of organism could descend from another type goes back to some of the first pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, such as Anaximander and Empedocles.[34] Such proposals survived into Roman times. The poet and philosopher Lucretius followed Empedocles in his masterwork De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution#History_of_evolutionary_thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution#History_of_evolution... Darwin described one mechanism (i.e. natural selection) that drives evolution.
- sageikosa 10y ago
  Natural selection and mutation. The most revolutionary thing wasn't that there was change, but that the changes were effectively "random" change. Randomness and species interrelatedness is what drove (still drives) teleological fanatics absolutely nuts.
- azakai 10y ago
  To be fair to Darwin, he proposed another mechanism as well, sexual selection. Also, his two mechanisms were revolutionary at the time, and many decades later remain the most important factors in our understanding of evolution. Yes, the general idea of evolution as "species change, rise and fall" is not a new one in Darwin's time. But today when we say "evolution" we basically mean "evolution by natural selection" which is Darwin's novelty.

chriskanan 10y ago

Darwin worked out a theory for how evolution works with supporting evidence. The idea of evolution had been around for a while due to similarities between animals and due to paleontology. But many scientists ridiculed it until Darwin had his convincing theory and evidence. One of the biggest opponents pre-Darwin was Cuvier: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier

joering2 10y ago
Any idea where it might be going? Is is possible the evolution pretty much stopped with humans? Someone told me that AI/technology implanted into humans will be next movement for evolution but looking back that's not how evolution evolved no?
- christophilus 10y ago
  Evolution, by definition, will never stop, so long as there is life. It is the way life works. It doesn't mean progress towards some arbitrary goal, such as intelligence or strength. It means fitness for the current environment. You might argue that the cockroach is one of the most successful products of evolution.
  - azakai 10y ago
    Evolution in the sense that Darwin meant it - natural selection - does depend on some specific details of life. Namely, there must be variation in the species, the variation must be heritable, and there must be something that causes some of the species to produce more offspring. Without one of those, natural selection stops. In theory, life might exist without one of them - if we live forever and stop having children, or if we all have the same amount of children, or if we design our children's genes artificially, etc.
    - svachalek 10y ago
      Who is "we"? All life on earth? Even "we" as humanity is a colony organism; we have more non-human cells in our bodies than human ones.

jaequery 10y ago

In a historic sense, It's quite fascinating to think that we all evolved from just dirt, water, and gas.

skywhopper 10y ago

Darwin came up with a theory of a _mechanism_ (natural selection) by which the evolution that was _observed_ in nature happens. Neither Darwin nor Wallace "discovered" evolution. Evolution is a feature of our world, easily observed and utilized by animal and plant breeders for hundreds of centuries. But what was brilliant about Darwin's theory was that he proposed it while knowing basically nothing about the underlying biological features that enabled it--ie, discrete genes that are duplicated, sometimes with errors, in successive generations of individuals. What blew my mind when I first understood these ideas was that given discrete genes, and given unequal chances of successful reproduction for various sets of genes, natural selection is essentially axiomatic. The rules of the game force natural selection to exist. There is no other way it can work. So I think it's fair to say that Darwin discovered natural selection. But not evolution. By the way if you are interested in this topic at all and you haven't read "On the Origin of Species", do yourself a favor and seek it out. It's public domain so it's available all over the Internet and there are plenty of good printed editions available as well. For its age, it's remarkably clear and concise even for modern readers. It's well-written and the author takes a very humble approach to the topic. As an argument it's a fantastic example of building to your conclusion by step after concrete step of irrefutable evidence. And when Darwin had to get speculative, he was correct an incredibly high percentage of the time, so even his wildest ideas still hold up today.

ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
>> The rules of the game force natural selection to exist. There is no other way it can work. care to cite a proven example of speciation caused by natural selection ?
- laurencerowe 10y ago
  Lenski's famous experiment observed speciation in the lab: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lenski_affair http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lenski_affair
  - mratzloff 10y ago
    Thanks for linking that. Interesting read about an experiment I hadn't heard of.

not_that_noob 10y ago

I didn't know this part - Darwin is a mensch! "Wallace sent his ideas to the English naturalist Charles Darwin, with whom he often exchanged letters. As it happened, Darwin had been working for 20 years on his own theory of natural selection, partly inspired by his 1835 visit to the Galápagos Islands. Darwin had not published his ideas, because he was afraid of a backlash. He quickly realised that Wallace's discoveries matched up with his own, and resolved to take the plunge. He decided to present both their papers at the same time, so that both men would get credit for having independently discovered evolution. In the immediate aftermath, they both became famous. But after Darwin published his book On the origin of species by means of natural selection in 1859, he became known as the man who discovered evolution. Most people forgot about Wallace."

azakai 10y ago
> Darwin had not published his ideas, because he was afraid of a backlash. And he had good cause to be worried. Many initial responses were very negative. And although consensus shifted to firm agreement with him, a small but strong opposition exists to this day in multiple forms.
- Numberwang 10y ago
  Well, mostly one form. The religious one.
  - azakai 10y ago
    The secular opposition is significant as well (as summarized in e.g. Pinker's The Blank Slate [1]). I don't think we can say either the religious or secular one is clearly larger than the other. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Angostura 10y ago
    Don't forget that Darwin's original destination was going to be to train as a parish priest.

rokhayakebe 10y ago

Reading the first few pages of the "Origin of Species...." it is clear Darwin does not state he discovered evolution. From the onset the first book/chapter is a collection of studies on the subject and scientists who have come to similar conclusions well before him according to him.

abecedarius 10y ago

Darwin and Wallace both thought of natural selection on reading Malthus's essay on the principle of population. I guess that's a reproducible route to the idea -- send a curious British naturalist to South America and some islands, then loan them a copy of Malthus. I'd like to read Malthus myself someday and see how close he came. Darwin did some historical research on his predecessors for a later edition of the Origin. Wallace wasn't the only independent discoverer, though the others did not take it nearly as far. https://historiesofecology.blogspot.com/2013/08/predecessors-of-darwin-and-wallace.html https://historiesofecology.blogspot.com/2013/08/predecessors...

adv9517 10y ago

Whitewashing by the BBC is becoming commonplace in this post-truth era. The article doesn't bother to mention the fact that Wallace was racist, even enabling and documenting the beating of indigenous "workers" during his first trip in South America predating his less violent South East Asian tours. Wallace wrote Can the tropics be permanently colonized by Europeans, and particularly by men of the Anglo-Saxon race? This is the question that now occupies much attention in view of the mad struggle among the chief European Governments for a share of all those parts of tropical Africa and Asia still held by inferior races. http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S562.htm http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S562.htm

jaimebuelta 10y ago

It's important to note that Darwin and Wallace didn´t "discover" evolution, which was already known at the time. Lamarck presented his ideas half a century before Darwin. They came with an explanation on what was the cause for it (natural selection). The theory has been improved and consolidated with the understanding of genetics since then...

mannykannot 10y ago
Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (a member of Birmingham's Lunar Society) was a believer in evolution, and even compared it to domestication and hybridization, an analogy that helped Charles develop his theory. Ironically, Charles originally believed in the fixity of species.