HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Oct. 18, 2004 Most all theories are the culmination of the thinking of, usually many other thinkers. This is true with Darwin, who is known as the father of evolution. As theories tend to morph into new theories with further contemplation from others, it should not be a surprise that Darwin’s theory of evolution is not complete. The commonly accepted force that drives evolution being natural selection does not fully explain why a species is capable of making the necessary biological changes that enable it to better exist in any given environment. The notion that a species would be so fortunate, as by chance, to have offspring with changes that benefit its existence in an ever-changing environment is illogical at best. The concept leaves far too much for chance to be a viable speculation on its own. That is not to say that Darwin was incorrect, as he was indeed correct; he merely did not complete the theory. I have extended the theory, and simply stated, biological modifications are the result of deliberate thought, which are then perpetuated by natural selection by means of heredity. All living creatures have the capacity for thought, and it is that ability itself that creates evolutionary change. When faced with new obstacles, or environmental changes, a living creatures thought is what produces the changes on a cellular level that insures a species survival. This concept of evolution is more logical, as the survival of the species is guaranteed by the necessary changes being created, not by the changes simply occurring by chance. It is also logical that some changes can indeed occur by chance, or mutation, though it would be unlikely that any significant changes would occur in a timely manner for a species to survive any radical environmental changes. Since many creatures have remained the same for millennia, is it not logical that mutation and heredity are likely not the actual force behind evolution, but the driving force is in reality thought. For if mutation and heredity were the key, would it not be true that all creatures would be subject to constant change, therefore subjecting them to more unproductive than productive changes, especially if the environment remained constant. One must consider that the creatures that have not needed to change for millennia are from areas where there have been no significant climactic or environmental changes since these creatures populated these areas. Therefore, it is not hard to determine that mutation and heredity are both genuine phenomenon, and are part of the process, however they do not drive evolution. It is thought that is the driving force behind evolution, while mutation and heredity assist in perpetuating the positive changes. To better understand how a theory can, and does continue to morph into new theories the rest of this work is an epigrammatic account of the mindset of Darwin’s times, and those prior to his time that played a big part in building Darwin’s theory of evolution. Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Grandfather, lived from 1731 to 1802, and after studying at Cambridge and Edinburgh, he established his medical practice in Lichfield. It was an immediate success, with patients traveling considerable distances for his consultations. At one stage in his career he was offered, but refused, the post of royal physician to King George III. In addition to medicine, he had an extremely broad range of scientific interests. He was a founding member of the Lunar Society, whose members included some of the greatest innovators of the age: Josiah Wedgwood, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen. Darwin’s own inventions and ideas varied enormously. A horizontal windmill invented in 1765 was made and used by Josiah Wedgwood. He designed a carriage that would not tip over in 1766. In 1771, he invented a speaking machine, a canal lift for barges, and a tiny artificial bird. In 1778, he invented a copying machine and a variety of weather monitoring machines that included a north-south airflow machine, and a weather vane that had the pointer in his study During the following decade, he continued his work, and in 1783, conducted research into the formation of clouds, which he published in 1788. However, despite his many innovations, he retained no patents. He felt they would have harmed his reputation as a doctor and instead encouraged his friends to pursue his ideas; they then patented their own modified versions. Additionally, Erasmus Darwin was also one of the most successful poets of his time. He published several volumes of botanical verse that received great acclaim, and proved stylistically influential to the likes of Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Coleridge. Between 1794 and 1796, he published his book, Zoonomia. This book discussed scientific topics, including a theory of how all life originated from one lineage, and from them became all the variety of animals on the planet. His grandson, Charles Darwin, would later further develop this theory. Erasmus Darwin was one of the leading intellectuals of eighteenth century England. He was a man with a remarkable range of talents, including being a physician, a well-known poet, a philosopher, a botanist, and a naturalist. As a naturalist, he formulated one of the first formal theories on evolution in Zoonomia, and The Laws of Organic Life, 1794-1796. He also presented his evolutionary ideas in verse, in particular in the poem, The Temple of Nature, which was published after his death. Although he did not come up with natural selection, he did discuss ideas that his grandson elaborated on sixty years later, such as how life evolved from a single common ancestor forming one continual living thread. Unfortunately, he struggled with the question of how one species could evolve into another. Although some of his ideas on how evolution might occur were quite close to those of Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin also talked about how competition and sexual selection could cause changes in a species. Erasmus Darwin arrived at his conclusions through an integrative approach: he used his observations of domesticated animals, the behavior of wildlife, and he integrated his vast knowledge of many different fields, such as paleontology, biogeography, systematics, embryology, and comparative anatomy. In addition to Erasmus’ contributions to the future of biological studies, he was also a leader in an intellectual community that contributed to the emergence of the industrial era. It is probably no coincidence that Charles Darwin, the grandson of such a progressive thinker, produced some of the most important work in the history of biological and social thought. Carolus Linnaeus, Latin for Carl von Linne, lived from 1707 to 1778, he was a Swedish physician and botanist who is regarded as the father of taxonomy, which is the classification of organisms in categories based on common characteristics. He developed a system of classifying plants and animals, which is still in use today. Moreover, a century after he developed it, this system would be used to argue for evolution. Linnaeus was a self-righteous, Bible believing man who sought to define the basic, kinds, set forth in Genesis, as species. He realized that variation could take place within a kind, but not from one kind to another. He regarded his search for order in the world of diversity as, for the greater glory of God. His classification and categorization had a revolutionary effect on the study of all living things. He originally intended to become a doctor, but gradually shifted his interest to botany. He went on important botanizing and collecting expeditions to Lapland in 1731, and central Sweden in 1735. His classification system developed during the time that he was restoring the famous botanical garden at Uppsala University, and it became the basis for almost all subsequent systems of classification. Linnaeus clearly believed that his binomial classification was merely revealing the details of an unalterable and divine plan, but the relationships pointed to by his classifications contributed to the eventual understanding of the morphological similarities among species, while also providing powerful evidence for common origins. He was criticized for the overtly sexual nature of many of his descriptions of plants. One critic responded to one description of pollination by claiming, "the loathsome harlotry of several males to one female would not have been permitted in the vegetable kingdom by the Creator". Erasmus Darwin was quoted as saying, "Linnaeus, the celebrated Swedish naturalist, has demonstrated that all flowers contain families of males or females, or both; and on their marriages has constructed his invaluable system of Botany". Linnaeus was the first to describe human beings as Homo sapiens, meaning, man + wise, and although he criticized any idea that suggested evolution, he did argue that humans and chimpanzees shared a genus: Homo troglodytes, meaning man + cave dweller. Most later classifications disagreed that chimps and humans could be so closely related, but recent genetic analysis has proven that the founder of modern systematic taxonomy was correct. Georges Cuvier lived from 1769 to 1832; he was a French anatomist, and another Bible believing scientist who was considered one of the chief architects of the science of paleontology. Cuvier believed that different fossils in strata were due to successive catastrophes, with Noah’s Flood being the last in the series. He was a firm creationist and participated in, and won debates in creation versus evolution. Cuvier went to school at the Carolinian Academy in Stuttgart from 1784 to 1788. He was then a tutor for a noble family in Normandy, where he first began to establish a reputation as a naturalist. In 1795, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire invited Cuvier to come to Paris. Cuvier was first appointed as an assistant and later a professor of animal anatomy at the post-French revolution Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle. When Napoleon came to power Cuvier was appointed to several government positions, including State Councillor and Inspector-General of public education. After the restoration of the monarchy, Cuvier still managed to preserve his status, and in 1831, he became Baron of France. Cuvier was one of the most influential figures in science during the early nineteenth century. A self-appointed judge of proper science from his stronghold in the elite Académie des Sciences, he was as successful in creating his own image as a great man of science, as he was in the many areas of science he studied. Cuvier's scientific achievements were many, with such abilities as being able to reconstruct a skeleton based on a single bone. His work is considered the foundation of vertebrate paleontology. Cuvier expanded Linneaun taxonomy by grouping classes into phyla. He arranged both fossils and living species in this taxonomy. He convinced his contemporaries that extinction was a fact; this had been a controversial speculation before. Cuvier strongly opposed Geoffroy's theory that all organisms were based on a basic plan or model and that they blended gradually one into another. Cuvier argued instead that life was divided into four distinct branches, i.e., vertebrates, mollusks, articulates, and insects & crustaceans. For Cuvier, it was function, not hypothetical relationships, which should form the basis of classification. This issue, which obviously could support or contradict a theory of evolution, was part of the famous Cuvier/Geoffroy debate in 1830. The debate has often been interpreted in the retrospect of a post-Darwin age as a debate over evolution. However, the debate mostly revolved around the number of models necessary to categorize all organisms. In his Essay on the Theory of the Earth, 1813, Cuvier proposed that new species were created after periodic catastrophic floods. His study of the Paris basin with Alexandre Brongniart established the basic principles of biostratigraphy. Cuvier was a strong opponent of his colleague Lamarck's theory of evolution. He believed there was no evidence for the evolution of organic forms, but instead evidence for successive divine creations after catastrophic extinction events. Thomas Robert Malthus lived from 1766 to 1834; he believed that human suffering by war and famine were the inevitable consequence of the population increasing much faster than the supply of food. This concept was outlined in his classic 1798 work, Essay on the Principle of Population. Charles Darwin's concepts of the struggle for existence were influenced by Malthus' work. Darwin is quoted as saying, "In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read, Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work". This often quoted passage reflects the significance Darwin affords Malthus in formulating his theory of Natural Selection. What struck Darwin in Essay on the Principle of Population, was Malthus' observation that in nature plants and animals produce far more offspring than can survive, and that humans too are capable of overproducing if left unchecked. Malthus concluded that unless family size was regulated, human’s misery of famine would become globally epidemic and eventually consume us. Malthus' view that poverty and famine were natural outcomes of population growth and food supply was not popular among social reformers who believed that with proper social structures, all ills of humankind could be eradicated. Although Malthus thought famine and poverty to be natural outcomes, the ultimate reason for those outcomes was divine institution. He believed that such natural outcomes were God's way of preventing man from being lazy. Both Darwin and Wallace independently arrived at similar theories of Natural Selection after reading Malthus. Unlike Malthus, they framed his principle in purely natural terms both in outcome and in ultimate reason. By so doing, they extended Malthus' logic further than Malthus himself could ever take it. They realized that producing more offspring than can survive, establishes a competitive environment among siblings, and that the variation among siblings would produce some individuals with a slightly greater chance of survival. Malthus was a political economist who was concerned about what he saw as, the decline of living conditions in nineteenth century England. He blamed this decline on three elements: the overproduction of young, the inability of resources to keep up with the rising human population, and the irresponsibility of the lower classes. To combat this, Malthus suggested the family size of the lower class ought to be regulated such that poor families do not produce more children than they can support. China has implemented a policy of one child per family, though this applies to all families, not just those of the lower class. Robert Malthus, as he went by his middle name, was born in a country estate in Dorking, Surrey, south of London. He was the second son of Daniel Malthus, a country gentleman and avid disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, both of whom he knew personally. Malthus was educated according to the Rousseauvian principles of his father and a series of tutors. Malthus entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1784 and was ordained a minister of the Church of England in 1788 and he earned his Masters Degree in 1791. Around 1796, Malthus became a curate in the town of Albury, a few miles from his father’s house. Having been elected Fellow of Jesus College in 1793, he divided his time between Cambridge and Albury. It was in the course of his incessant intellectual debates with his father over the, perfectibility of society thesis, then being advanced by William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, when Malthus decided to set his ideas down on paper. It was eventually published as a pamphlet known as, Essay on the Principle of Population. In this famous work, Malthus put forth his hypothesis that unchecked population growth always exceeds the growth of means of subsistence. Actual checked population growth is kept in line with food supply growth by positive checks, i.e. starvation, disease and the like, elevating the death rate and preventive checks, i.e. postponement of marriage, etc. that keep down the birthrate, both of which are characterized by misery and vice. Malthus' hypothesis implied that actual population always has a tendency to push above the food supply. Because of this tendency, any attempt to improve the condition of the lower classes by increasing their incomes or improving agricultural productivity would be fruitless, as the extra means of subsistence would be completely absorbed by an induced boost in population. As long as this tendency remains, Malthus argued, the perfectibility of society would always be out of reach. In his much expanded and revised 1803 edition of the Essay, Malthus concentrated on bringing practical evidence to realization; this was accomplished in his extensive travels to Germany, Russia, and Scandinavia. He also introduced the possibility of moral restraint, and voluntary abstinence, which leads to neither misery or vice, bringing the unchecked population growth rate down to a point where the tendency is gone. In practical policy terms, this meant inculcating the lower classes with middle class virtues. He believed this could be done with the introduction of universal suffrage, state run education for the poor, and more controversially, the elimination of the Poor Laws and the establishment of an unregulated nation wide labor market. He also argued that once the poor had a taste for luxury, they would demand a higher standard of living for themselves before starting a family. Thus, although seemingly contradictory, Malthus is suggesting the possibility of demographic transition, i.e. that sufficiently high incomes may be enough by themselves to reduce fertility. The Essay transformed Malthus into an intellectual celebrity. He was despised by many as a callous monster, a prophet of doom, an enemy of the working class, etc. The ridicule and criticism rained down on Malthus by the classes was relentless. Nevertheless, a sufficient number of people recognized his essay for what it was: the first serious economic study of the welfare of the lower classes. Even Karl Marx, who deplored his conservative policy conclusions, grudgingly granted him this. In 1804, Malthus got married and thereby forfeited his fellowship at Cambridge. In 1805, Malthus was appointed Professor of Modern History and Political Economy at the East India College in Haileybury, thereby becoming England's first academic economist. Malthus became interested in money in 1800, when he published a pamphlet describing a theory of money. Contrary to the Quantity Theory, Malthus argued that rising prices are followed by increases in the quantity supplied. Around 1810, Malthus came across a series of tracts by a stockbroker, David Ricardo, on monetary questions. He immediately wrote to Ricardo and the two men initiated a correspondence that would last for over a decade. In 1814, Malthus launched himself into the Corn Laws debate then raging in parliament. After a first pamphlet, Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws, and of a rise or fall in the price of corn on the agriculture and general wealth of the country, outlining the pros and cons of the proposed protectionist laws, Malthus tentatively supported the free traders, arguing that the cultivation of British corn was increasingly expensive to raise, it was best if Britain, at least in part, found cheaper foreign sources for its food supply. He changed his mind the next year, in his 1815 pamphlet, The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn, siding now with the protectionists. Foreign laws, he noted, often prohibit, or raise taxes on the export of corn in lean times, which meant that the British food supply was captive to foreign politics. By encouraging domestic production, Malthus argued, the Corn Laws would guarantee British self-sufficiency in food. In his 1815, An Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent, and the principles by which it is regulated, Malthus came up with the differential theory of rent. Although it was simultaneously discovered by Torrens, West, and Ricardo, Malthus' pamphlet was the first of the four to be published. Refuting older contentions, that rent was a cost of production; Malthus argued that it was merely a deduction from the surplus. Rent, Malthus argued, is enabled by three facts: first that agricultural production yields a surplus; next that the wage- fertility dynamics guarantee that the price of corn would remain steadily above its cost of production; lastly that fertile land is scarce. Ricardo’s own 1815 essay was actually a response to Malthus. Ricardo dismissed Malthus' arguments, arguing that Malthus' third cause, that land differs in quality and is limited in quantity, is sufficient to explain the phenomenon of rent. He incorporated Malthus' theory of rent with his own theory of profits to provide the classical statement of the theory of distribution. He also dismissed Malthus' feeble attempts to defend parasitical landlords and the Corn Laws. Malthus' own criticism of Ricardo's 1815 essay led them into a debate on the question of value. Malthus supported Smith's old labor-commanded theory of value, whereas Ricardo favored the labor-embodied version. The outcome of the discussion was Ricardo's Principles in 1817, which set down the doctrine of the Classical School on value, distribution and production, incorporating at least two of Malthus' own contributions: the natural wage version of Malthus' population theory and an expanded version of Malthus' theory of rent. Malthus was never comfortable as a member of the Classical school. Nowhere is this more evident than in Malthus' own essay, Principles of Political Economy, 1820. He differs from the Classical Ricardians at several points. For instance, Malthus introduced the idea of a demand schedule in the modern sense, i.e. as the conceptual relationship between prices and the quantity sought by buyers rather than the empirical relationship between prices and quantities sold. He also paid much attention to the short-run stability of prices, insisting on a labor-commanded theory of value and, thirdly, and most famously, Malthus denied the validity of Say's Law and argued that there could be a general glut of goods. Malthus believed that economic crises were characterized by a general excess supply caused by insufficient consumption. His defense of the Corn Laws rested partly on the need for landlord consumption to make up for shortfalls in demand and thus avert crisis. James Hutton lived from 1726 to 1797; he was a Scottish geologist who believed that the features of the earth could be explained by slow processes over time, this was know as gradualism. For example, canyons could be cut by rivers running down their lengths, or sedimentary rocks with marine fossils were made from particles, which had eroded from land, and were carried by rivers into the sea. Hutton was born in Edinburgh, and educated at the high school and university of his native city; while a student, he acquired a passionate love of scientific inquiry. He was apprenticed to a lawyer, but was advised that a more amiable profession should be pursued. The young apprentice chose medicine, being similar to his passion, chemistry. He studied for three years at Edinburgh, and completed his medical education in Paris, and taking his degree of doctor of medicine at Leiden in 1749. However, finding that there was no opening for him, he abandoned the medical profession, and, having inherited a small property in Berwickshire from his father, resolved to devote himself to agriculture. Hutton then went to Norfolk to learn farming, and subsequently traveled in Holland, Belgium and the north of France. During these years he began to study the surface of the earth, gradually shaping in his mind the problem to which he afterwards devoted his energies. In the summer of 1754, he established himself on his own farm in Berwickshire, where he lived for fourteen years, and where he introduced improved forms of husbandry. As the farm was brought into excellent order, and as its management became easier, and grew less interesting, he let it go, and in 1768 he establish himself in Edinburgh for the rest of his life, devoting himself to research. At that time, geology in the sense of the term did not exist. Mineralogy, however, had made considerable progress. Nevertheless, Hutton had conceived larger ideas than were entertained by the mineralogists of his day. He desired to trace back the origin of the various minerals and rocks, and thus to arrive at some clear understanding of the history of the earth, and for many years, he continued to study the subject. In the spring of the year 1785, he communicated his views to the recently established Royal Society of Edinburgh in a paper entitled Theory of the Earth, or an Investigation of the Laws Observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe. In this remarkable work the principle is illustrated that geology is not the origin or formation of the universe. It must confine itself to the study of the materials of the earth; that everywhere evidence may be seen that the present rocks of the earth's surface have been in great part formed out of the waste of older rocks; that these materials having been laid down under the sea were there consolidated under great pressure, and were subsequently disrupted and up heaved by the expansive power of subterranean heat; that during these convulsions veins and masses of molten rock were injected into the fissures of the dislocated strata; that every portion of the upraised land, as soon as exposed to the atmosphere, is subject to decay; and that this decay must tend to advance until the whole of the land has been worn away and laid down on the seafloor, and future upheavals will once more raise the consolidated sediments into new land. In some of these broad and bold generalizations, Hutton was anticipated by the Italian geologists of his time; but the credit belongs to him of having first perceived their mutual relations, and combined them in a brilliant coherent theory based upon observation. It was not merely the earth to which Hutton directed his attention, as he had long studied the changes of the atmosphere. The same volume in which his Theory of the Earth appeared contained also a Theory of Rain, which was read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1784. He contended that the amount of moisture which the air can retain in solution increases with augmentation of temperature, and, therefore, that on the mixture of two masses of air of different temperatures a portion of the moisture must be condensed and appear in visible form. He investigated the available data regarding rainfall and climate in different regions of the globe, and came to the conclusion that the rainfall everywhere is regulated by the humidity of the air on the one hand, and the causes which promote mixtures of different aerial currents in the higher atmosphere on the other. The strength and versatility of his genius may be understood from the variety of works, which, during his thirty-year residence in Edinburgh, he gave to the world, including a four-volume essay entitled Dissertations on different Subjects in Natural Philosophy, in which he discussed the nature of matter, fluidity, cohesion, light, heat, and electricity. Some of these subjects were further illustrated by him in papers read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He did not restrain himself within the domain of physics, but advanced into that of metaphysics, publishing essays with the titles, An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, and of the Progress of Reason from Sense to Science and Philosophy. In this work he developed the idea that the external world, as conceived by us, is the creation of our own minds influenced by impressions from without, that there is no resemblance between our picture of the outer world and the reality, yet that the impressions produced upon our minds, being constant and consistent, become as much realities to us as if they precisely resembled things actually existing, and, therefore, that our moral conduct must remain the same as if our ideas perfectly corresponded to the causes producing them. Hutton’s last years were devoted to the extension and republication of his Theory of the Earth, of which two volumes appeared in 1795. He left a third volume in manuscript form, and is referred to by his biographer John Playfair. A portion of this volume, which had been given to the Geological Society of London by Leonard Horner, was published by the Society in 1899, under the editorship of Sir A. Geikie. The rest of the manuscript appears to be lost. Soon afterwards, Hutton set to work to collect and systematize his numerous writings on husbandry, which he proposed to publish under the title of Elements of Agriculture. He had nearly completed this labor when an incurable disease ended his career on March 26, 1797. It is by his Theory of the Earth that Hutton will be remembered, while geology continues to be refined. However, by result of the author's style, being somewhat heavy and obscure, the book did not attract much readership during his lifetime, and not nearly as much attention as it deserved. Luckily for science, Hutton’s friend John Playfair, professor of mathematics in the university of Edinburgh, held an enthusiasm for the spread of Hutton's doctrine. Five years after Hutton's death he published a volume, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth, in which he gave an admirable summary of that theory, with numerous additional illustrations and arguments. This work is justly regarded as one of the classical contributions to geological literature. To its influence, much of the sound progress of British geology must be credited. Charles Lyell lived from 1797 to 1875; he carried Hutton's gradualism farther, into Uniformitarianism, the concept that geological processes are uniform through time. For example, the processes that built mountains were balanced by the erosion of mountains. Lyell was educated as a lawyer, wrote, Principles of Geology, and had a very strong influence on Charles Darwin by acting as a mentor of sorts. Darwin once said, "I always feel as if my books came half out of Lyell's brain, and that I never acknowledge this sufficiently". Lyell was the eldest son of Charles Lyell of Kinnordy, Forfarshire. His father was known both as a botanist and as the translator of the Vita Nuova and the Convito of Dante. From his boyhood, Lyell had a strong inclination for natural history, especially entomology. In 1816, he entered Exeter College, Oxford, where the lectures of Dr. Buckland first drew his attention to geological study. After receiving his B.A. in 1819, he entered Lincoln's Inn, and in 1825, after a delay caused by chronic weakness of the eyes, he was called to the bar, and went on the western circuit for two years. During this time, he was slowly gravitating towards the life of a student of science. In 1819, he had been elected a fellow of the Linnean and Geological Societies, communicating his first paper, On a Recent Formation of Freshwater Limestone in Forfarshire, to the latter society in 1822, and acting as one of the honorary secretaries in 1823. In that year, he went to France, and met Cuvier, Humboldt, and other men of science, and in 1824, he made a geological tour in Scotland with Dr. Buckland. In 1826, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, from which in later years he received both the Copley and Royal medals; and in 1827, he finally abandoned the legal profession, and devoted himself to geology. At this time, he had already begun to plan his chief work, The Principles of Geology. The subsidiary title, An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation, gives the keynote of the task to which Lyell devoted his life. A journey with Murchison in 1828, gave rise to joint papers on the volcanic district of Auvergne and the Tertiary formations of Aix-en- Provence. After parting with Murchison, he studied the marine remains of the Italian Tertiary Strata and then conceived the idea of dividing this geological system into three or four groups, characterized by the proportion of recent to extinct species of shells. To these groups, after consulting Dr. Whewell as to the best classification, he gave the names now universally adopted, Eocene, dawn of recent, and Miocene, less of recent, and Pliocene, more of recent. With the assistance of G. P. Deshayes, he drew up a table of shells in illustration of this classification. The first volume of the Principles of Geology appeared in 1830, and the second in January 1832. At first they were received with some opposition, so far as its leading theory was concerned, ultimately the work had a great success, and the two volumes had already reached a second edition in 1833 when the third, dealing with the successive formations of the earth's crust, was added. Between 1830 and 1872, eleven editions of this work were published, each so much enriched with new material and the results of riper thought as to form a complete history of the progress of geology during that time. Only a few days before his death Lyell finished revising the first volume of the twelfth edition; the revision of the second volume was completed by his nephew Leonard Lyell; and the work appeared in 1876. In 1838, Lyell published the Elements of Geology, which, from being originally an expansion of one section of the Principles, became a standard work on stratigraphical and palaeontological geology. His third great work, The Antiquity of Man, appeared in 1863, and ran through three editions in one year. In this, he gave a general survey of the arguments for human's early appearance on the earth, derived from the discoveries of flint implements in post- Pliocene strata in the Somme valley and elsewhere; he also discussed the deposits of the Glacial epoch, and in the same volume he first gave in his linkage to Darwin's theory of the origin of species; a fourth edition appeared in 1873. From 1831 through 1833 Lyell, was professor of geology at King's College, London, and while there delivered a course of lectures, which became the foundation of the Elements of Geology. In 1834, he made an excursion to Denmark and Sweden, the result of which was his Bakerian lecture to the Royal Society, On the Proofs of the gradual Rising of Land in certain Parts of Sweden. He also brought before the Geological Society a paper, On the Cretaceous and Tertiary Strata of Seeland and Möen. In 1835, he became president of the Geological Society. In 1837, he was again in Norway and Denmark, and in 1841, he spent a year traveling through the United States, Canada and Nova Scotia. This last journey, together with a second one to America in 1845, resulted not only in papers, but also in two works not exclusively geological, Travels in North America, 1845 and, A Second Visit to the United States, 1849. During these journeys, he estimated the rate of recession of Niagara falls, the annual average accumulation of alluvial matter in the delta of the Mississippi, and studied vegetation accumulations in the, Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia, which he afterwards used in illustrating the formation of beds of coal. He also studied the coal-formations in Nova Scotia, and discovered with Dr. Dawson of Montreal, the earliest known land shell, and Pupa vetusta, in the hollow stem of a Sigillaria. In bringing knowledge of European geology to the extended formations of North America, Lyell provided vast assistance. Having visited Madeira and Teneriffe with Hartung, he accumulated valuable evidence on the age and deposition of lava-beds and the formation of volcanic cones. He also revisited Sicily in 1858, when he made such observations upon the structure of Mt. Etna and refuted the theory of, craters of elevation, upheld by Von Buch and Élie de Beaumont. Lyell was knighted in 1848, and was made a baronet in 1864, in which year he was president of the British Association at Bath. He was elected corresponding member of the French Institute and of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, and was created a knight of the Prussian Order of Merit. During the later years of his life, his sight, which had been weak for years, failed him altogether. He died on February 22, 1875, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Among his characteristics were his great thirst for knowledge, his perfect fairness and sound judgment, while the tremendous originality of his mind enabled him to accept and appreciate the work of younger men. Jean Baptiste Lamarck lived from 1744 to 1829; he was a French botanist who was a significant figure on the road to the theory of evolution. He held the position of curator of the invertebrate collection at the natural history museum in Paris. Instead of seeing life as a static ladder, he viewed it more as an escalator. On the bottom were microscopic organisms that were continually being formed and driven by an innate tendency to greater complexity, until finally complex plants and animals were at the top. Lamarck believed that change in organisms was in response to, sentiments interieurs, or felt needs. He is best known for two notions: Use and disuse, were organs that are used increase in size and strength. For example, the biceps of a blacksmith would get larger and stronger, a legitimate theory, or by stretching for leaves a giraffe got a long neck, an untrue theory. Other examples are birds that lived in water got webbed feet; moles became blind by living underground, or rams got their horns by getting mad. The second notion was Acquired characteristics; Lamarck believed the changes acquired in an organism’s lifetime could be passed to the next generation. By this reasoning, the long neck of the giraffe was the gradual result of many generations of stretching and stretching. Lamarck was born at Bazentin-le-Petit, Picardy, on August 1, 1744. He was the youngest of eleven children, born to noble, but not particularly prosperous parents in rural France. The family had a strong military background, with several generations serving as officers in the French army, and some of Lamarck's older brothers made their careers in the military. His father, Phillipe, expected him to take a career in the church. However, Lamarck was not inclined to the ministry, and when his father died in 1760, he quit his Jesuit college, and joined the French army in their campaign near Fissinghausen, Germany. Lamarck was forced to leave military life when stationed at Monaco; after being injured, he acquired inflammation of the lymphatic glands in the neck, and had to be taken to Paris for further treatment. Unfortunately, surgery only made the injury worse, and Lamarck was decommissioned. Finding himself suddenly reduced to a meager military pension he went back to studying the natural sciences that had been part of his instruction at college. He became increasingly captivated with the natural sciences, finally abandoning medicine, as he had the church, the army, banking, and music for botany. At the age of thirty-four, after studying botany for ten years, he succeeded in having his Flore Française published. This volume brought him great acclaim, and it remained a standard work for many years. He began associating with premiere French botanists, and was elected to the prestigious French Academy of Sciences the following year. He toured Europe in search of new botanical specimens and returned to keep the Royal herbarium at the Jardin des Plantes. In the following years, Lamarck continued his research, studied shells, and produced various works on botany, physics, and meteorology. Lamarck faithfully attended meetings of the Academy right up until the time he became ill, which forced his retirement. He was instrumental in the 1793 reorganization of the Jardin des Plantes into the French Museum of Natural History, and he was appointed one of its professors in 1794. He was put in charge of insects and worms, a field in which he was far from specialized. Despite this lack of expertise, Lamarck committed himself to learning everything he could about invertebrates, a term Lamarck coined, and categorizing the Museum's vast and disorganized collection. His system of dividing and subdividing the organisms according to type set the standard for later systems of invertebrate taxonomy, and is still used to this day. Discovering, as he carried out this work, that animals varied by sometimes minute degrees, Lamarck began to formulate new ideas about the relationships between animals, and then about the transmutation of species into new ones. In 1809, Lamarck published his most famous work, Philosophie Zoologique. This volume describes his theory of transmutation, which consisted of several components. Underlying the whole was a tendency to progression, a principle that Creation is in a constant state of advancement. It was an inherent quality of nature that organisms constantly improved by successive generation, too slowly to be perceived, but observable in the fossil record. Humankind sat at the top of this chain of progression, having passed through all the previous stages in prehistory. However, this necessitated the principle of spontaneous generation, for as a species transformed into a more advanced one, it left a gap: when the simple, single-celled organisms advanced to the next stage of life, new protozoans would be created, by the Creator, to fill their place. However, the overarching component of Lamarckian evolutionism was what became known as the inheritance of acquired characters. This described the means by which the structure of an organism altered over generations. Change occurred because an animal passed on to its offspring physiological changes it had undergone in its own lifetime, and those changes came about by its responding to its survival needs. Lamarck's theory was not generally accepted in his lifetime, and Cuvier, his colleague at the Museum, tried to undermine him and any ideas about transformism. Lamarck found little respect among his peers, while Cuvier was greatly respected. He retired from his botanical works when his eyesight deteriorated seriously in his seventies. The last ten years of his life were spent, blind, destitute, and removed from all scientific activity. He died, on December 18,1829. Gregor Mendel lived from 1822 to 1884, his theories of heredity, based on his work with pea plants, are well known to any student of biology, however his work was so brilliant and unprecedented at the time it appeared that it took thirty-four years for the rest of the scientific community to catch up to it. The short paper, Experiments with Plant Hybrids, in which Mendel described how traits were inherited, has become one of the most enduring and influential publications in the history of science. Mendel was the first person to trace the characteristics of successive generations of a living thing, though he was not a world-renowned scientist of his day. He was an Augustinian monk who taught natural science to high school students. Mendel's brilliant performance at school as a young man encouraged his family to support his pursuit of a higher education, however their resources were limited, so Mendel entered an Augustinian monastery, continuing his education and starting his teaching career. Mendel's attraction to research was based on his love of nature. He was not only interested in plants, but also in meteorology and theories of evolution. Mendel often wondered how plants obtained atypical characteristics. On one of his frequent walks around the monastery, he found an atypical variety of an ornamental plant. He took it and planted it next to the typical variety. He grew their progeny side by side to see if there would be any approximation of the traits passed on to the next generation. This experiment was, designed to support or to illustrate Lamarck's views concerning the influence of environment upon plants. He found that the plants respective offspring retained the essential traits of the parent’s, and therefore were not influenced by the environment. This simple test gave birth to the idea of heredity. Mendel's research reflected his personality, he once crossed peas, and mice of different varieties just for the fun of it, were he observed the phenomena of dominance and segregation. He saw that the traits were inherited in certain numerical ratios. He came up with the idea of dominance and segregation of genes and set out to test it in peas. It took seven years to cross and score the plants by the thousand to prove the laws of inheritance. From his studies, Mendel derived certain basic laws of heredity, i.e. that hereditary factors do not combine, but are passed intact. In other words, each member of the parental generation transmits only half of its hereditary factors to each offspring, with certain factors being dominant over others; and different offspring of the same parent’s receive different sets of hereditary factors. Mendel's work became the foundation for modern genetics, and the impact of genetic theory. Many diseases are known to be inherited, and pedigrees are typically traced to determine the probability of passing along a hereditary disease. Because of his work, plants are now propagated to exhibit desired characteristics. The practical results of Mendel's research has not only changed the way we perceive the world, but also the way we live in it. Alfred Russel Wallace lived from 1823 to 1913, and he is one of the forgotten father’s of modern science. He was born in the village of Usk in Monmouthshire, England. His father died when he was young, not long after his formal schooling had ended. He joined his brother, William, in surveying a number of English counties over the next four years. This experience was to teach him how to make accurate observations and detailed recordings, skills that would be of immense importance in his later life. Shortly after this, Wallace was appointed to the position of drawing-master at the Collegiate School in Leicester. It was here that he met Henry Walter Bates, a fellow teacher who introduced him to the methods of botany. After two years, the friends set out for South America on an expedition that would take them to explore the Amazon and Rio Negro rivers. In order to cover a larger area Bates and Wallace split up. He spent over four years in the tropical jungles of Brazil before setting sail for home in 1852. In a disaster on the high seas, Wallace's ship caught fire and had to be abandoned. He lost his entire collection and most of his notes. Fortunately, the crew and passengers were rescued by a passing vessel. Such a disaster would have overwhelmed a lesser person, but Wallace turned his energies to writing an account of his time in Brazil, Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. Within twelve months he again left England and sailed eastwards towards Singapore. It was here, over the next eight years that Alfred Russel Wallace was to make the great voyage that led to his formulation of the theory of Natural Selection. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel lived from 1834 to 1919; he was a German biologist, and studied medicine and science at Würzburg, Berlin, and Vienna, having mentors such as Johannes Müller, R. Virchow, and R. A. Kölliker and in 1857 graduated at Berlin as an M.D. By request of his father, he began to practice as a doctor in that city, but his patients were few in number, one reason was because he did not want very many, and after a short time, he turned to pursuits that were more agreeable. In 1861, upon the request of Carl Gegenbaur, he became Privatdozent at Jena, in the succeeding year he was chosen extraordinary professor of comparative anatomy and director of the Zoological Institute, in the same university, and in 1865, he was appointed to a chair of zoology, which was specially established for his benefit. This last position he retained for 43 years, in spite of repeated invitations to migrate to more important centers, such as Strassburg or Vienna. He spent most of his life at Jena, with the exception of the time he devoted to traveling in various parts of the world, when in every case he brought back a rich zoological harvest. As a field naturalist, Haeckel displayed extraordinary power and diligence. Among his monographs were those on Radiolaria, 1862, Siphonophora, 1869, Monera, 1870 and Calcareous Sponges, 1872, as well as several Challenger reports: Deep-Sea Medusae, 1881, Siphonophora, 1888, Deep-Sea Keratosa, 1889 and Radiolaria, 1887, the last being accompanied by one hundred and forty plates and enumerating over four thousand new species. This output of systematic and descriptive work would alone have constituted a good life's work, but Haeckel in addition wrote abundantly on biological theory. In 1859, just as he was beginning his scientific career, Darwin's Origin of Species was published; it affected him so intensely that he became the champion of Darwinism in Germany. He was, indeed, the first German biologist to give a wholehearted adherence to the doctrine of organic evolution and to treat it as the cardinal conception of modern biology. Haeckel first brought it to the attention of German men of science in his first memoir on the Radiolaria, which was completely infused with its spirit, and later at the congress of naturalists at Stettin in 1863. Darwin himself has placed on record the conviction that Haeckel's enthusiastic promotion of the doctrine was the chief factor of its success in Germany. His book on General Morphology, 1866, published when he was only thirty-two years old, was called by Huxley a suggestive attempt to work out the practical application of evolution to its final results; and if it does not take rank as a classic, it will at least stand out as a landmark in the history of biological doctrine in the nineteenth century. Although it contains most of the views with which Haeckel's name is associated, it did not attract much attention on its first appearance, and accordingly its author rewrote much of its substance in a more popular style and published it a year later as Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, the Natural History of Creation, which was far more successful. In it he divided morphology into two sections: tectology, the science of organic individuality; and promorphology, which aims at establishing a crystallography of organic forms. Among other matters, he laid particular stress on the fundamental biogenetic law, that ontogeny summarizes phylogeny, that the individual organism in its development is largely an embodiment of the original form. His well-known gastraea theory is an outcome of this generalization. He divided the whole animal creation into two categories: the Protozoa or unicellular animals, and the Metazoa or multicellular animals, and he pointed out that while the former remain single-celled throughout their existence, the latter are only so at the beginning, and are subsequently built up of innumerable cells, the single primitive egg cell being transformed by cleavage into a globular mass of cells, which first becomes a hollow vesicle and then changes into the gastrula. The simplest multicellular animal he conceived to resemble this gastrula with its two primary layers, ectoderm and endoderm, and the earliest hypothetical form of this kind, from which the higher animals might be supposed to be actually descended, he called the, gastraea. This theory was first put forward in the memoir on the calcareous sponges, which in its sub-title was described as an attempt at an analytical solution of the problem of the origin of species, and was subsequently elaborated in various Studies on the Gastraea. Haeckel was the first to attempt to draw up a genealogical tree, exhibiting the relationship between the various orders of animals with regard both to one another, and their common origin. His earliest attempt in the general morphology was succeeded by many others, and his efforts in this direction may perhaps be held to conclude in the paper he read before the fourth International Zoological Congress, held at Cambridge in 1898, when he traced the descent of the human race in twenty-six stages from organisms like the still-existing Monera, simple structureless masses of protoplasm, and the unicellular Protista, through the chimpanzees and the Pithecanthropus erectus, of which a few fossil bones were discovered in Java in 1894, and which he held to be undoubtedly an intermediate form connecting primitive man with the anthropoid apes. Haeckel not being content with the study of the doctrine of evolution in its zoological aspects also applied it to some of the oldest problems of philosophy and religion. What he termed, the integration of his views on these subjects, he published under the title of Die Welträtsel, 1899, which in 1901, came out in English as The Riddle of the Universe. In this book, adopting an uncompromising monistic attitude, he asserted the essential unity of organic and inorganic nature. According to his, carbontheory, which has been far from achieving general acceptance, the chemico-physical properties of carbon in its complex albuminoid compounds are the sole and the mechanical cause of the specific phenomena of movement which distinguish organic from inorganic substances, and the first development of living protoplasm, as seen in the Monera, arises from nitrogenous carbon compounds by a process of spontaneous generation. Psychology he regarded as merely a branch of physiology, and psychical activity as a group of vital phenomena, which depend solely on physiological actions and material changes taking place in the protoplasm of the organism in which it is manifested. Every living cell has psychic properties, and the psychic life of multicellular organisms is the sum-total of the psychic functions of the cells of which they are composed. Moreover, just as the highest animals have been evolved from the simplest forms of life, so the highest faculties of the human mind have been evolved from the soul of the brute- beasts, and more remotely from the simple cell- soul of the unicellular Protozoa. Because of these views, Haeckel was led to deny the immortality of the soul, the freedom of the will, and the existence of a God. ------------ About the author Sean Curtis: I am the author of Steal This Book Too! In the process of writing Steal This Book Too, I have spent years researching, and contemplating the animal that is human. I was born in 1959, during the perplexing cold war era, then experienced the social revolution of the 1960’s. I have, as countless others have, experienced first hand the hypocrisies of society. I recall that my first media memory was the assassination of President Kennedy. Pondering the inadequacies of society, such as poor child rearing, social injustice, moral injustice, political corruption, religion, and war, has lead meto examine human evolution; consequently, realizing that the theory is not portrayed correctly, or complete in its explanation. My insight into the complex animal that is human is revealed in my effort of portraying humankind’s existence throughout the ages, as well as how we can peaceably change society. I am curently writing a fiction novel titled The Island of Humans, in which I use my theories, and philosphies put forth in Steal This Bokk Too! as a basis for the plot. WWW.stealthisbooktoo.com Email: seancurtis007@sbcglobal.net Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
