Week 1 Historical Influences on Darwin
1. The individual I chose for my post is Charles Lyell.
2. Charles Lyell's contribution made towards the scientific community was "Uniformitarianism" which involves the process of change in the earths crust. This made Charles Darwin view evolution from more of a biological standpoint. And this was a major contribution towards natural selection and how the earth proved that everything does in fact change over time.
3. I believe that Uniformitarianism positively affected the way Charles Darwin viewed evolution after he "applied Lyell's ideas." In fact, he helped and backed evidence of Charles Darwin's ideas of evolution by determining that it definitely is true, even though it is a long process that takes place "from one generation to the next."
4. I do not believe Charles Darwin could have effectively proved the Natural Selection theory without Charles Lyell. Darwin
2. Charles Lyell's contribution made towards the scientific community was "Uniformitarianism" which involves the process of change in the earths crust. This made Charles Darwin view evolution from more of a biological standpoint. And this was a major contribution towards natural selection and how the earth proved that everything does in fact change over time.
3. I believe that Uniformitarianism positively affected the way Charles Darwin viewed evolution after he "applied Lyell's ideas." In fact, he helped and backed evidence of Charles Darwin's ideas of evolution by determining that it definitely is true, even though it is a long process that takes place "from one generation to the next."
4. I do not believe Charles Darwin could have effectively proved the Natural Selection theory without Charles Lyell. Darwin
These are complex issues and required more explanation and detail. You don't have an upper limit on word count here. Expand. Show us what you know and explain your answers in full.
ReplyDeleteFor example, in your opening paragraph:
"This made Charles Darwin view evolution from more of a biological standpoint."
But how does Lyell's work on the influences on the shape of the Earth's crust translate into support for Darwin's mechanism for biological evolution via natural selection? I agree that it DOES translate, but this needed to be explained.
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.
"In fact, he helped and backed evidence of Charles Darwin's ideas of evolution by determining that it definitely is true"
No! He didn't! Lyell actually didn't agree with the concept of evolution, which is ironic since his theory was so important to Darwin's work.
This section asks you to choose the bullet point(s) from the guidelines that best describe your scientist's influence over Darwin's work. It is a bit trickier to make this choice for Lyell, given that he wasn't directly involved in evolutionary theory, but the one that fits best is likely the one regarding the influence of a changing environment, which impacts both the earth's crust and natural evolutionary processes. Perhaps more importantly was the contribution of the concept of "deep time" as without that, Darwin's theory wouldn't have worked.
Your next paragraph is incomplete. I agree with your conclusion, but missing the explanation. Looks like it was cut off.
Missing the last point on the influence of the church on Darwin's decision to publish.
I myself made the decision to write about Charles Lyell, because I was fascinated by the concept that uniformitarianism was applied not only to a geological standpoint, but a biological one as well. I agree with your statement that the earth's crust does in fact prove that change occurs over a lot of time. With that in mind, Darwin took that concept and applied it to biological species.
ReplyDeleteIn your third answer you explained that Darwin's theory was backed by Lyell. More specifically, Lyell offered a solution to an unanswered question in Darwin's theory of evolution. By proposing that the Earth was possibly millions of years old (by observing the changes in the crust of the Earth), Darwin was able to conclude that likewise to the crust, species took millions of years to evolve.
In conclusion, I also agree that without Lyell's theory, Darwin would not have been able to prove his theory of evolution. If the earth was only thousands of years old (which was what was believed at the time), then Darwin would not have been able to prove how species evolved because that would not have been enough time hypothetically.
Although, I argued on that Thomas Malthus was Darwin's greatest influence on his theory of Natural selection, I can understand your point on how Charles Lyell was an influence on him as well. I agree with you that "Unitarianism" played a positive impact on his theory as without this theory, Charles would have been unable to know that the earth was far more older than people believed it to be. Therefore, he was able to take Lyell theory and confirm that there would have been plenty of time for evolution to happen.
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