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> There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experime

> There was an understanding of natural selection even back to antiquity. How could there not be? Did people not tame the animals and plants? These are experiments, and they saw the results. No, people did not know natural selection before Darwin. He spent decades collecting and then analyzing data collected in Galapagos Islands before he made his breakthrough. It's pure hindsight bias to think that you can go from "I bred the fattest chickens together, who made a fatter chicken" to "Humans evolved from apes who evolved from single-cellular organisms". For millennia, people from all cultures believed that God created humans from the void. In the absence of data, that's as good a guess as you can have. If Darwin concocted his theory of natural selection before he had his data, no one would have believed him. By dismissing the theory of natural selection as something that was "obvious" pre-Darwin you are dismissing his life's work.

godelski 2y ago
> No, people did not know natural selection before Darwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection Read the history. The topics discussed were are not reminiscent of evolution because hindsight, they are similar because they are similar. Darwin himself references many of these. People knew of artificial selection because they did it. You don't breed animals and plants without some basic knowledge here. I'm not saying Darwin's work wasn't important. It's critical. But this does not warrant dishonoring and forgetting all those who did work that led to that point. Their work wasn't as ground breaking and influential, but they still helped set the stage. Darwin's work didn't appear out of a vacuum. Science doesn't happen in leaps and bounds. > By dismissing the theory of natural selection as something that was "obvious" pre-Darwin you are dismissing his life's work. This is a grave misinterpreting of what I mean. You have made mountains out of the pebbles I described. It can both be true that scatterings of the ideas exist, with only circumstantial evidence for them, while also monumental work be accomplished to legitimize those ideas and fill in so many holes. Your basis of what the average person believes is also irrelevant. Even still many reject evolution and so many more did even just a decade or two ago. It was national debate not even a century ago.

godelski 2y ago

> No, people did not know natural selection before Darwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection Read the history. The topics discussed were are not reminiscent of evolution because hindsight, they are similar because they are similar. Darwin himself references many of these. People knew of artificial selection because they did it. You don't breed animals and plants without some basic knowledge here. I'm not saying Darwin's work wasn't important. It's critical. But this does not warrant dishonoring and forgetting all those who did work that led to that point. Their work wasn't as ground breaking and influential, but they still helped set the stage. Darwin's work didn't appear out of a vacuum. Science doesn't happen in leaps and bounds. > By dismissing the theory of natural selection as something that was "obvious" pre-Darwin you are dismissing his life's work. This is a grave misinterpreting of what I mean. You have made mountains out of the pebbles I described. It can both be true that scatterings of the ideas exist, with only circumstantial evidence for them, while also monumental work be accomplished to legitimize those ideas and fill in so many holes. Your basis of what the average person believes is also irrelevant. Even still many reject evolution and so many more did even just a decade or two ago. It was national debate not even a century ago.