
Another person that discovered evolution besides Darwin - happy-go-lucky
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20161104-the-other-person-that-discovered-evolution-besides-darwin
======
not_that_noob
I didn't know this part - Darwin is a mensch!

"Wallace sent his ideas to the English naturalist Charles Darwin, with whom he
often exchanged letters. As it happened, Darwin had been working for 20 years
on his own theory of natural selection, partly inspired by his 1835 visit to
the Galápagos Islands.

Darwin had not published his ideas, because he was afraid of a backlash. He
quickly realised that Wallace's discoveries matched up with his own, and
resolved to take the plunge. He decided to present both their papers at the
same time, so that both men would get credit for having independently
discovered evolution.

In the immediate aftermath, they both became famous. But after Darwin
published his book On the origin of species by means of natural selection in
1859, he became known as the man who discovered evolution. Most people forgot
about Wallace."

~~~
azakai
> Darwin had not published his ideas, because he was afraid of a backlash.

And he had good cause to be worried. Many initial responses were very
negative. And although consensus shifted to firm agreement with him, a small
but strong opposition exists to this day in multiple forms.

~~~
Numberwang
Well, mostly one form. The religious one.

~~~
azakai
The secular opposition is significant as well (as summarized in e.g. Pinker's
The Blank Slate [1]). I don't think we can say either the religious or secular
one is clearly larger than the other.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate)

------
chriskanan
Darwin worked out a theory for how evolution works with supporting evidence.
The idea of evolution had been around for a while due to similarities between
animals and due to paleontology. But many scientists ridiculed it until Darwin
had his convincing theory and evidence.

One of the biggest opponents pre-Darwin was Cuvier:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier)

~~~
joering2
Any idea where it might be going? Is is possible the evolution pretty much
stopped with humans? Someone told me that AI/technology implanted into humans
will be next movement for evolution but looking back that's not how evolution
evolved no?

~~~
christophilus
Evolution, by definition, will never stop, so long as there is life. It is the
way life works. It doesn't mean progress towards some arbitrary goal, such as
intelligence or strength. It means fitness for the current environment. You
might argue that the cockroach is one of the most successful products of
evolution.

~~~
azakai
Evolution in the sense that Darwin meant it - natural selection - does depend
on some specific details of life. Namely, there must be variation in the
species, the variation must be heritable, and there must be something that
causes some of the species to produce more offspring.

Without one of those, natural selection stops. In theory, life might exist
without one of them - if we live forever and stop having children, or if we
all have the same amount of children, or if we design our children's genes
artificially, etc.

~~~
svachalek
Who is "we"? All life on earth? Even "we" as humanity is a colony organism; we
have more non-human cells in our bodies than human ones.

~~~
milkytron
Could you please elaborate on this part:

> we have more non-human cells in our bodies than human ones.

I'm not the most educated in biology, but I thought if a cell is created in
our body by our body, it is a human cell. Is this wrong to think?

~~~
azakai
Depends what you mean by "created in our body by our body."

Your body begins with a single human cell, then divides and grows. All those
cells have your human DNA. But at some point bacterial cells also appear as
part of your body, for example in your digestive tract, playing important
roles you can't live without. Their source is not from your human cells, but
they still form part of your body as a whole, in a sense.

------
gwbas1c
Darwin didn't "discover" evolution. He just happened to collect evidence to
support a popular theory.

It's been awhile since I read Darwin's book, but he gave a lot of credit to
his father at the beginning. From what I remember, evolution was more of his
father's theory and Charles was young enough to make the trip, and lucky
enough to have a father with deep pockets to pay for it.

~~~
qntty
Yeah the title bothered me...

>The proposal that one type of organism could descend from another type goes
back to some of the first pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, such as Anaximander
and Empedocles.[34] Such proposals survived into Roman times. The poet and
philosopher Lucretius followed Empedocles in his masterwork De rerum natura
(On the Nature of Things).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution#History_of_evolution...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution#History_of_evolutionary_thought)

Darwin described one _mechanism_ (i.e. natural selection) that drives
evolution.

~~~
azakai
To be fair to Darwin, he proposed another mechanism as well, sexual selection.

Also, his two mechanisms were revolutionary at the time, and many decades
later remain the most important factors in our understanding of evolution.

Yes, the general idea of evolution as "species change, rise and fall" is not a
new one in Darwin's time. But today when we say "evolution" we basically mean
"evolution by natural selection" which is Darwin's novelty.

------
skywhopper
Darwin came up with a theory of a _mechanism_ (natural selection) by which the
evolution that was _observed_ in nature happens. Neither Darwin nor Wallace
"discovered" evolution. Evolution is a feature of our world, easily observed
and utilized by animal and plant breeders for hundreds of centuries.

But what was brilliant about Darwin's theory was that he proposed it while
knowing basically nothing about the underlying biological features that
enabled it--ie, discrete genes that are duplicated, sometimes with errors, in
successive generations of individuals.

What blew my mind when I first understood these ideas was that given discrete
genes, and given unequal chances of successful reproduction for various sets
of genes, natural selection is essentially axiomatic. The rules of the game
force natural selection to exist. There is no other way it can work. So I
think it's fair to say that Darwin discovered natural selection. But not
evolution.

By the way if you are interested in this topic at all and you haven't read "On
the Origin of Species", do yourself a favor and seek it out. It's public
domain so it's available all over the Internet and there are plenty of good
printed editions available as well. For its age, it's remarkably clear and
concise even for modern readers. It's well-written and the author takes a very
humble approach to the topic. As an argument it's a fantastic example of
building to your conclusion by step after concrete step of irrefutable
evidence. And when Darwin had to get speculative, he was correct an incredibly
high percentage of the time, so even his wildest ideas still hold up today.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
>> The rules of the game force natural selection to exist. There is no other
way it can work.

care to cite a proven example of speciation caused by natural selection ?

~~~
laurencerowe
Lenski's famous experiment observed speciation in the lab:
[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lenski_affair](http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Lenski_affair)

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
Don't see any mentioning of speciation in that article. From the looks of it
it's adaptation we're looking at, correct me if I'm wrong.

To my knowledge, to date, the established experimental cases of achieving
reproductive isolation (none achieving complete isolation btw)- no experiments
demonstrated morphological differences between the "species" they produced.

~~~
kirrent
I'll correct you because you're wrong. Adaptation is evolution. There's no
line in the sand, no requirement for 'morphological differences', and no
reproductive isolation before you call it evolution. Calling it adaptation is
just a no true Scotsman fallacy.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
Are we not discussing the "origin of species" ? Sure, you can call adaptation
"an evolution" in the same sense you can call a subset of something
"something".

Just because there's no evidence that natural selection leads to speciation it
doesn't mean speciation in an of itself is not an important part of the
evolutionary process unless of course you don't consider emergence of new
species a part of that process.

Defining a framework/requirement for "something" to be called "something" is
not a fallacy, removing the requirement because it doesn't fit your narrative
is though.

~~~
Amezarak
There is no bright line between species, ergo there is no point we can stop
and say "there! it's speciated!"

'Species' just an arbitrary dividing line humans invented. The reality is
much, much messier. We might call something a different species, but it might
still be able to breed with some other species. It might not ever do so
because of proximity. It might not ever do so due to some minor characteristic
throwing off mate signalling. Maybe it does, but the offspring aren't fertile.
Maybe it does, but the offspring are only rarely fertile, like mules. There's
this and a thousand other edge cases.

If you sit there and change an organism gene-by-gene, at what point do _you_
think it becomes another species? If I flip a single gene and it affects
reproduction, is it a different species? If I flip a thousand genes but it
still interbreeds, is it a different species? Similarly, if you imagine going
back through the line of your male ancestors, there's no point at which you
can look between your great grandpappy^x and your great grandpappy^x + 1 and
say one of them is homo sapiens and one of them is not.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
Sure, biological taxonomy is not absolute and it's criteria like
"morphological differences" can be interpreted in different ways.

That said though - we DO clearly observe speciation in the paleo records
(assuming you won't be claiming that Eohippus == Modern Horse) so yes at some
point these genome changes accumulate into a critical mass leading to
speciation. Except that the "accepted" (there is obv some very solid criticism
out there) narrative of natural selection being the only(or primary) vector of
that change is yet to be proven after ~200 years of attempts to do so.

Speaking of flipping of the "reproduction gene" \- if it gets flipped in a
single specimen via a random mutation then he's obv stuck in terms of his
reproductive ability, but that's a whole another can of worms no pun intended.

~~~
Amezarak
> That said though - we DO clearly observe speciation in the paleo records
> (assuming you won't be claiming that Eohippus == Modern Horse)

Sure, because we're looking at a big gap in time. An Eohippus never gave birth
to a horse, though. There were intermediate organisms in between E and H. But
as I said, there's no bright line you can point to and say one Eohippus is one
species and its immediate progeny are another.

Put another way, if you have H(n), H(n+1), H(n+2), H(n+3)...and so on, there's
no point at which you can say H(n+m) and H(n+m+1) are different species. But
sure, you can compare H(n) and H(n+2000) and say they're different species.
The line is inherently fuzzy. It disappears whenever you look too closely.
Only when you zoom out is it present.

If you concede that natural selection leads to small changes, you have
therefore conceded that it leads to speciation.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
>> But as I said, there's no bright line you can point to and say one Eohippus
is one species and its immediate progeny are another.

by this logic you can claim that "there's no bright line between the colors"
because there are shades between them. there are discreet species in the
Eohippus -> Modern Horse lineage however just like there's color white and
color black. there are also "subspecies" out there like polar bears being
essentially grizzly bears who adapted to living in the arctic but again this
doesn't negate the existence of distinct species in their lineage.

>> If you concede that natural selection leads to small changes, you have
therefore conceded that it leads to speciation.

and by this logic taking a CS101 class equals to graduating with a masters
degree.

sympatric speciation (or rather lack of proof in this area) has been a thorn
in darwinists' collective sides since the day "the origin of species" came out
and is a huge hole in the whole "emergence of new species via natural
selection" narrative. so huge as a matter of fact that after couple of
hundreds of years of trying to figure out how it works they decided it wasn't
all that important :)

~~~
Amezarak
> again this doesn't negate the existence of distinct species in their
> lineage.

There's only distinct species from the million-years-view. They only _look_
distinct because the fossil record does not include every horse-ancestor who
ever lived - the vast majority of them are gone from history. From the on-the-
ground, year-by-year perspective, you have Eohippus very, very slowly looking
more and more like a horse, so slowly that at no point do you really notice
them changing from Eohippus to horse. We just arbitarily decided that the
total gene pool back then was "Eohippus" and today it is "horse"; and even,
say, the modern horse genetic pool is probably more diverse than any arbitrary
Eohippus and many of its descendants.

The idea of a "species" in general only makes sense to us because almost
everything that ever lived is dead.

> by this logic you can claim that "there's no bright line between the colors"

Well...there isn't. If you're dialing up light-frequencies a thousandth of a
nanometer at a time from 400nm to 700nm, there's no point where you say "this
is purple" and the next thousandth-meter adjustment you say "this is blue."

I'm not sure we're talking about the same things.

~~~
ChemicalWarfare
>> They only look distinct because the fossil record does not include every
horse-ancestor who ever lived..

no, they look distinct because they belong to different species.

>> there's no point where you say "this is purple" and the next thousandth-
meter adjustment you say "this is blue."

umm, there are discrete "blue" and "purple" points. to state the opposite is
plain ridiculous :)

------
abecedarius
Darwin and Wallace both thought of natural selection on reading Malthus's
essay on the principle of population. I guess that's a reproducible route to
the idea -- send a curious British naturalist to South America and some
islands, then loan them a copy of Malthus. I'd like to read Malthus myself
someday and see how close _he_ came.

Darwin did some historical research on his predecessors for a later edition of
the Origin. Wallace wasn't the only independent discoverer, though the others
did not take it nearly as far.
[https://historiesofecology.blogspot.com/2013/08/predecessors...](https://historiesofecology.blogspot.com/2013/08/predecessors-
of-darwin-and-wallace.html)

------
rokhayakebe
Reading the first few pages of the "Origin of Species...." it is clear Darwin
does not state he discovered evolution. From the onset the first book/chapter
is a collection of studies on the subject and scientists who have come to
similar conclusions well before him according to him.

------
jaimebuelta
It's important to note that Darwin and Wallace didn´t "discover" evolution,
which was already known at the time. Lamarck presented his ideas half a
century before Darwin.

They came with an explanation on what was the cause for it (natural
selection). The theory has been improved and consolidated with the
understanding of genetics since then...

~~~
mannykannot
Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (a member of Birmingham's Lunar
Society) was a believer in evolution, and even compared it to domestication
and hybridization, an analogy that helped Charles develop his theory.
Ironically, Charles originally believed in the fixity of species.

------
jaequery
In a historic sense, It's quite fascinating to think that we all evolved from
just dirt, water, and gas.

------
adv9517
Whitewashing by the BBC is becoming commonplace in this post-truth era. The
article doesn't bother to mention the fact that Wallace was racist, even
enabling and documenting the beating of indigenous "workers" during his first
trip in South America predating his less violent South East Asian tours.
Wallace wrote

Can the tropics be permanently colonized by Europeans, and particularly by men
of the Anglo-Saxon race? This is the question that now occupies much attention
in view of the mad struggle among the chief European Governments for a share
of all those parts of tropical Africa and Asia still held by inferior races.

[http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S562.htm](http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/S562.htm)

