During the Voyage of the Beagle Charles Darwin became convinced by Charles Lyell's uniformitarianism, and puzzled over how various theories of creation fitted the evidence he saw. Then at Cambridge University his theology studies convinced him of William Paley's argument of "design" by a Creator while his interest in natural history was increased by the botanist John Stevens Henslow and the geologist Adam Sedgwick, both of whom believed strongly in divine creation and in a uniformitarian ancient earth. The publication of the anonymous Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation ( 1844) then paved the way for the acceptance of Origin.Ĭharles Darwin's education at the University of Edinburgh gave him direct involvement in Robert Edmund Grant's evolutionist developments of the ideas of Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Charles Babbage believed God set up laws that operated to produce species, as a divine programmer, and Richard Owen followed Johannes Peter Müller in thinking that living matter had an "organising energy", a life-force that directed the growth of tissues and also determined the lifespan of the individual and of the species. Various ideas were developed to reconcile Creation biology with scientific findings, including Charles Lyell's uniformitarian idea that each species had its "centre of creation" and was designed for the habitat, but would go extinct when the habitat changed. At this time the work of Thomas Malthus showing that human populations increased to exceed resources influenced liberal thinking, resulting in the Whig Poor Law of the 1830s. These theories of Transmutation were developed by Radicals in Britain like Robert Edmund Grant. In 1809 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck developed a similar theory, with "needed" traits being acquired then passed on. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Charles Bonnet, Lord Monboddo and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck played roles in the foreshadowing of evolutionary thought in the mid 18th and early 19th centuries.īy 1796 Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin had put forward ideas of common descent with organisms "acquiring new parts" in response to stimuli then passing these changes to their offspring, and in 1802 he hinted at natural selection. Countering this, James Hutton's uniformitarian theory of 1785 envisioned gradual development over aeons of time. Discoveries showing the extinction of species were explained by catastrophism, the belief that animals and plants were periodically annihilated as a result of natural catastrophes and that their places were taken by new species created ex nihilo (out of nothing). Natural history, aiming to investigate and catalogue the wonders of God's works, developed greatly in the 18th century. Other ideas resurfaced, and in 17th century English the word evolution (from the Latin word "evolutio", meaning "unroll like a scroll") began to be used to refer to an orderly sequence of events, particularly one in which the outcome was somehow contained within it from the start. With the rise of Christianity came belief in the Biblical idea of creation according to Genesis, with the doctrine that God had directly " Created kinds" of organisms which were immutable. The idea of biological evolution was supported in Classical times by the Greek and Roman atomists, notably Lucretius. Although its ideas are supported by an overwhelming body of scientific evidence and are widely accepted by scientists today, they are still highly controversial in some parts of the world, particularly among American non-scientists who perceive them to contradict various religious texts (see Creation-evolution controversy). The book is quite readable even for the non-specialist and attracted widespread interest on publication. The work presents detailed scientific evidence that Darwin had accumulated on the Voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s and since his return, painstakingly laying out his theory and refuting the doctrine of " Created kinds", which underlay the then widely accepted theories of Creation biology. In it, Darwin makes "one long argument", with copious empirical examples as support, for his theory that organisms gradually evolve not individually but in "groups" (now called populations) through the process of natural selection, a mechanism the book effectively introduced to the public. The Origin of Species (full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) by British naturalist Charles Darwin, first published on 24 November 1859, is one of the pivotal works in scientific history and arguably the pre-eminent work in biology. The title page of the 1859 edition of On the Origin of Species.
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