Even though it is oft linked with the famed naturalist, but
did you know that evolution is not Charles Darwin’s original idea?
By: Ringo Bones
Believe it or not, “Darwinism” or "Darwinian Evolution" is not synonymous with the
principle of evolution, as is sometimes incorrectly stated. Charles Darwin was
the first to put forward a really detailed analysis of the evidence of
evolution based on his data of comparative anatomy, embryology, the common
finding of rudimentary or vestigial structures in many animals, the
geographical distribution of different types and – to some extent – on his
observations of the fossil records of different types. He developed the
hypothesis of natural selection as a mechanism to explain not only how the
process of evolution could have occurred, but how it must have occurred, from
the observed fact that all living organisms are subject to heritable
variations.
The general idea of evolution or “transformism” as it was
commonly termed has been put forward by a number of writers long before Charles
Darwin’s time. Even the Classical Greek thinker Aristotle and the Roman poet
and philosopher Lucretius presented vague conceptions of a “ladder of nature”
which might be interpreted to suggest the idea that lower forms of life passed
by a gradational series into higher forms. It has been claimed that Darwin’s
own ideas developed more directly from his immediate predecessors such as Jean
Baptiste de Lamarck and Robert Chambers, the author of The Vestiges of Creation
(1844) that Darwin himself recognized.
It has even been suggested that Charles Darwin lacked the
historical sense in not giving due credit to his predecessors. But the theory
of transformism at the time was clouded with perplexities and apparent
contradictions. The pioneering attempts to formulate an evolutionary hypothesis
were not acceptable to professional biologists of the first half of the 19th
Century. This was partly because the scientific evidence was so freely
intermingled with ill-founded and rather fanciful speculations and partly
because it could provide no reasonable explanation of the mechanism for an evolutionary
process. Since these earlier essays on transformism were not accepted by the
biological scientists in general, they aroused no serious opposition from
theologians and others who hold the conviction that the different species of
living things were separate and distinct entities whose origin was determined
by a creative process – either a single act of creation as described in Genesis
or successive acts of creation. It is true however that before Darwin’s time,
geologists had already recognized the existence in the past of extinct
creatures and various attempts had been made to explain this evidence so long
as to bring it into conformity with contemporary – as in 19th
Century – ideas based on the Biblical record.
