2 ms·

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 philoso

by 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.