> But Buffon never figured out how this species change actually took place: it took Darwin, and his theory of natural selection, to shed light on the process.
Natural selection is the most important part of Darwin's theory. The title exaggerates
To understand what makes species evolve, you first must acknowledge that they do, to what extent and at what time scale. Buffon clearly was the first to understand the latter.
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.
Exactly. It was well understood that animals and plants evolved before Darwin. I have a popular science book from about 1890. It is called “Evolution for the normally intelligent gentleman”. The first thing it does is say that the dispute between Darwin and Lemarc is beyond the scope of this book.
If you just look at plant morphology and animal anatomy then evolution is kind of obvious.
>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.
Wallace never gets due credit. Darwin did give him credit - e.g. referring to "our theory" in a letter to him.
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).
Darwin did give him a shout out, the biggest difference here was very likely the levels of self promotion;
Wallace failed to promote his role in formulating the theory as effectively as Darwin.
~ your bbc link
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.
Patrick Matthew wrote about natural selection in the 1830s, but he did it in an appendix to a book about naval timber, so it didn't register with anybody at the time.
Thanks for posting. Putting the book on my to-read list.
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:
> 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”.
The below comes from a a better read than theguardian promo for a new book.
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.
That's not all that impressive compared to Lucretius, who writes the following in 50 BCE:
> 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.
This may sound very "hindsight is always 20-20" but why was evolution not always obvious? Traits that help reproduction will increase. Traits that hinder reproduction will decrease. Why was it controversial, and what did people believe before that?
It was commonly believed the species had been created fully formed, like in Genesis. Slective breeding was known, but it was not obvious that entirely new species could be created that way. There is a big step from breeding a bigger dog to breeding a dog into an octupus.
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.
None of that makes sense or works without the idea that traits are the result of continuous random mutations, which is a very non-obvious idea (and very controversial considering the orthodoxy of divine creation — humans were created by god, so what do you mean they are changing?).
And to add to this, it also relies on the fact that inheritance occurs in discrete units (which today we call genes). One of the early criticisms was that mutations would "average out" in a large population, and thus natural selection would never get off the ground!
For starters, as mentioned in the article, the age of the Earth was far from settled for a long time. If you think the Earth is a few thousand or tens of thousands of years old, evolution can't be right, it is too slow.
To give some context on how obvious or non-obvious it was, Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, which was the same year Louis Pasteur disproved the popular idea of spontaneous generation. That was a theory put forth by Aristotle that (at least some forms of life) would just spontaneously arise from dust or mud.
That theory wasn’t directly related to the origin of man, but it gives an idea of where scientific theories were at the time.
I prefer to think that Aristotle wasn't wrong, just operating at an insufficiently-complex level of abstraction. Life did / does spontaneously generate, but it involves amino acids and cosmic rays (or something like that), not rotting meat and sunshine. (Wasn't that the experiment Pasteur used? Proving that flies had to lay invisible eggs before maggots could appear.)
I do think this distinction is important beyond how we view Aristotle. Some creationists argue Louis Pasteur disproved abiogenesis (and in their view, evolution as well) even though his experiments addressed the spontaneous generation of life under current conditions, not whether any form of life can form from nonliving material at all. I believe he disproved both maggots and microorganisms spontaneously generating.
In some sense I think because language itself is very much “noun-based.” By this, I mean that we talk about humans, dogs, flowers, and so on using nouns that don’t incorporate change into the structure of the language, and thus conceiving of a process-based metaphysics (of which evolution is basically a description of) is not intuitive. Even now, the concept of a species is kind of a wonky concept.
I wonder how common this problem is in other areas. The question of free will comes to mind. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, language has a very strong impact on your thoughts about it. And it's not just language. We could be missing many great ideas because of our seemingly arbitrary limitations.
I haven’t read enough Wittgenstein to have a serious opinion on his work, but I do think he touches on this issue. The line “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” is popping into my mind.
That there are small variations and that they can be amplified is obvious, and humans have used them in selective breeding since forever. But it's not obvious that you can take it far enough that you can create new species. Or that you can end up with very different creatures like humans and birds just by selecting for long enough.
This doesn't tell you how or even whether you could end up with an elephant, a bat or a whale from a shrew-like ancestor. The thousands of years of human experience with animal husbandry and artificial selection did not produce a flying dog or man-eating battlecow.
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.
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.
Natural selection is the most important part of Darwin's theory. The title exaggerates