The French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Natural selection is the most important part of Darwin's theory. The title exaggerates
There are probably multiple reasons for this. I can think of multiple reasons Darwin was more appealing to people. Wallace was religious, and he was not racist (not that Darwin was any worse than most of his time, but Wallace was different).
It was not always so: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-21549079
There are a number of people who came close to the idea including Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather.
Wallace failed to promote his role in formulating the theory as effectively as Darwin.
and Darwin was very much on home ground in the UK actively riding on Wallace's extensive field work and spreading a Darwin flavoured spin on the very material Wallace was writing in from the tropics.
Both were very good writers, Darwin had greater visibility during the early days simply by being there to meet, greet, and lecture.
Many of the "Darwin" ideas in the popular mind came from elsewhere; Survival of the fittest was Spencer and although later taken up as a phrse by both Darwin and Wallace it's almost the active opposite of the more passive (and more correct) notion of Survival of the best adapted.
Not sure about that that. Darwin goes on and on and on sometimes - especially about pigeons.
I mean, pigeons
The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms was a total spade turner.
There is a similar story with geology, and a similar pushback. A natural philosopher reported in the 18th century that locals in the Alps thought that there had been extinct glaciers, as the cause of massive solitary rocks in places where they couldn't just have rolled from a mountain. To established savant, this was clearly fanciful, as it contradicted the infallible Bible.
If you just look at plant morphology and animal anatomy then evolution is kind of obvious.
Before evolution this was the "great chain of being" ontology which tried to explain the continuous gradation of structures in the world. Ideas like "missing link" appear within this worldview before Darwin's theory[1]. It's mostly accurate to say evolutionary theory is the great chain of being worldview with an added temporal dimension.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being#Scala_Nat...
I'm now convinced that just about any idea that is put into print has probably crossed at least one other person's mind at one point. The sorts of sociological factors mentioned in the article are important to be mindful of in thinking about why ideas get put forth or spread when they do.
My first association with Georges-Louis Leclerc is with Buffon's needle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffon%27s_needle_problem
It's interesting to see his name come up in a different context. I had no idea he was interested in evolution and ecology.
That’s what he’s most famous for. As the article alludes to, he more or less created ecology as a science. His Natural history is huge as well, this was a milestone in the establishment of zoology as a discipline. It is difficult to overstate how important he was for biology as a whole.
The evolution stuff is more or less a consequence of this: he noticed similarities and differences between species living in different places and in what we would now call ecological niches. That said, even though he got some intuition for the concept of evolution, he did not really find a good driving force to explain it (he explained the changes by changes in environment), which is an essential contribution of Darwin.
[edit] also, nobody calls him Georges-Louis Leclerc, he is usually referred to as “Buffon”.
According to Buffon, life originated already divided into a number of distinct types—an “internal mould” that organized the organic particles that made up any individual creature. But during migrations, life changed. As a species moved to new habitats, the supply of organic particles that could create new individuals changed, and the particles could thereby change a species’ mould. Buffon was, in other words, proposing a sort of proto-evolution. While he thought that this process couldn’t produce radically new kinds of body plans, he did claim that it could account for the geographical distribution of similar species around the world.
https://evolution.berkeley.edu/the-history-of-evolutionary-t...
> In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn't do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus.
> For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.
> Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now.
Different theories of evolution existed before Charles Darwin, but the mechanism driving the evolution was not understood.
Lucrete (Roman writer) had ideas close to Darwins natural selection - he believed the species had been initially created by all kinds of organs and body parts combinimg at random, but only the “fit” ones surviving. But I think Lucrete thought this was a historcal event, not an ongoing process.
It is amazing how ancients had great insights like also about atoms but it took close to two millennia to have these ideas refined.
In fact, the Oscar nominated movie Arrival is based entirely on this idea.
The strongest argument the creationists use when trying to push back against evolution, which actually works, is basically “do you really think your great grandfather was a monkey?”.
It takes incredible leaps of imagination to accept that different species had common ancestors and evolved from very different looking species.
Even if you do buy evolution it takes many leaps of imagination to propose and accept that not only do reptiles have a common ancestor with each other, and birds have a common ancestor and fish, etc. but all of them also evolved from a common ancestor.
And finally even after you accept that, while it wouldn’t take as much of a leap of imagination, it would definitely require fighting millennia of cultural and religious indoctrination to accept the idea that humans were also subject to the same processes as other animals.
That theory wasn’t directly related to the origin of man, but it gives an idea of where scientific theories were at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_d...
These are the ones I'm searching for and if their model is more logical, requires less assumptions, explains more and is more consistent, I change my paradigm. Unfortunately, you then have to either stop writing in forums like this, or get downvoted into oblivion.