Week 1 Historical Influences
1.One individual who I feel had a great influence over Darwin’s
development in natural selection was a man named Charles Lyell. A lawyer turned
geologist after seeing that people didn’t have an answer for a catastrophe.
People fell back on the bible. Lyell wanted and believe that there was a
science behind it, therefore I feel geology is very important since if it was
ant for geology how would we predict what we know now. We don’t blame the bible
anymore.
2.Charles Lyell made a major contribution to the science
community by believing and discovering the science of geology after learning
that one catastrophe was blamed on the bible “Noah’s Flood”. If it was ant for
geology how would we know how tell a storm is coming or to prepare for it? That
why I believe it’s a big contribution because Charles Lyell discovered it in
1800.s and is still a valuable tool today.
Source = http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/history_12
“Uniformitarianism Charles Lyell”
3.The point most affected by the individuals work of Charles
Lyell is bullet point “If the environment changes, the traits that are helpful
or adaptive to that environment will be different”. Charles Lyell theory had
everything to do with the environment. When the environment changes so do Earth
and as these catastrophes happen; it forms Earth as well.
4. Well Charles Darwin obviously shares the same concept
than these individuals. There individuals that believe everything has a reason
and things don’t just happen, there’s always an explanation behind it, the
science of things and I believe Charles Darwin would of came up with the idea
of natural selection anyway.
5.The attitude of the church affected Charles
Darwin significantly because it caused controversy. Darwin felt the backlash of
the church therefore he would hold his publishing in my opinion out of respect.
Your source is good, but your post doesn't reflect what was in the source, and it doesn't explain Lyell's work in terms of how it was related and influenced Darwin's.
ReplyDeleteYou are correct that Lyell was responding to the idea of Cuvier's "catastrophism", but he didn't discovery geology (he studied and did research in geology) and this didn't have anything to do with predicting catastrophic events.
To clarify: Lyell developed the theory of uniformitarianism, which demonstrated two things: First, that the earth was shaped through slow, gradual forces, a process that remarkably mirrors the process of natural selection, a parallel Darwin may well have noticed. Second, it demonstrated that these process occurred over a very long period of time, which was very significant to Darwin. Before Lyell, it was generally accepted that the earth was only a few thousand years old. Lyell demonstrated that the earth was at least millions of years old (we now know it is billions of years old). So how does that impact Darwin? Well, natural selection is a slow process. It would not have been possible for natural selection to produce not only the extant organisms in a few thousand years but also all of the extinct organisms. With Lyell's concept of "deep time", suddenly Darwin had the geological time he for his theory to work. Lyell, quite literally, gave Darwin the gift of time. Without that, Darwin's theory would not have worked.
I agree with your choice of bullet point. Just understand this in terms of the Lyell's theory of Uniformitarianism. Also recognize that aside from the bullet point, another key contribution from Lyell to Darwin was the understanding that the earth was millions (actually billions) of years old, not just thousands, which gave evolution the time needed to work.
The fourth point was with respect to your chosen scientist, Lyell. I'm not sure I understand your reasoning. I usually don't like to grant any one scientist so much credit as to be indispensable to the work of another, but in the case of Lyell, I'm willing to do so, primarily because without Lyell, Darwin literally wouldn't have had enough time for his mechanism to work. Without Lyell, Darwin was stuck.
For your last paragraph, you answer doesn't reflect historical records. Actually, the church didn't know Darwin existed until after he published (so Darwin wouldn't have felt a backlash just yet), but that doesn't mean the church didn't play a role in Darwin's decision to delay. Darwin delayed publishing for more than 20 years. The question is, why? And how did the influence of the church play a role in this delay? Did Darwin really delay publishing out of respect? That isn't what scientists are concerned with... to report the truth is the right thing to do, regardless of how it might offend anyone. More likely, Darwin delayed out of fear. So what were Darwin's concerns? And was he only worried about himself or was he also worried about how his family might be impacted by publishing?
Expand your answers and make sure you fully understand the concepts for these assignments. If you have questions, email me.
Hello Daisy,
ReplyDeleteI like the post and i like the points that you give about how he stated the earth changed over a slow period of time and that gave Darwin a type of time line to base that evolution takes a long time. I like this post very much and keep up the good work!