FROM THE ARCHIVES: A Short History of Evolutionary Theory

FROM THE ARCHIVES note: This post is from an older blog of mine that has since been taken down from the internet. It is presented here with minimal editing because I still find it interesting enough to share. The original post was published on 2 February 2014.

Before I begin, a note/disclaimer: This post is going to discuss the concept of Evolution. If that offends you, don't read it. In fact, don't read any of my blog. Just don't talk to me. I have no patience for creationist pseudoscience bullshit, I really don't. My entire career is based on the overwhelming evidence that evolution exists and if you can't handle that, you are weak and need to step out of my life. Door's over there.


Still with me? Good. Then let's begin.

Hey guys, remember when I met Charles Darwin?

Fellow anthropologists, I can feel your jealousy.

I majorly geeked out when I met that Darwin re-enactor, and got to talk evolutionary theory with both him and a fellow guest of the event, who happened to have a passion for the stuff. Evolution, when taught by someone who knows their stuff and has a passion for it, can be extremely fun to learn about, and it is my own personal belief that we all should be learning about it, fun or not!

But where did the theory come from? Okay, obviously it's science, it came from Darwin and others observing what they saw around them and coming to logical conclusions based on the biological evidence and the fossil record. Still, is it possible that maybe it wasn't that obvious? Why did it take us until the Victorian era to come to a conclusion that seems so overwhelmingly obvious now?

Friends, I am going to tell you how the idea of Evolution came about.

In the ancient and medieval eras, of course, no one was really discussing Evolution. In Christian Europe, at least, it was just accepted that everything existed as God had created it. (Interestingly enough, the modern Catholic church does not deny Evolution. They don't confirm it either, but they're not against it the way fundamentalist Christians are.) However, while no one was discussing evolutionary theory, some thinkers did start noticing that some organisms were more similar than others, and thus attempted to organise them somewhat.

One of these first attempts was by Aristotle (384-322 BCE), who I am willing to bed you've heard of, if at least in passing. Though he himself was not Christian, what he came up with was a precursor to Christian thought on the subject. It was called the "Great Chain of Being", and wasn't quite evolution, but he was trying to organise things based on what he saw.

You can see here that Christians took it to what they saw as its "logical conclusion"

The Great Chain of Being was based on the concept that there were lower organisms and higher organisms, with plants way down there at the bottom, and man near the top just below angels. It was really one of the first attempts, at least in western history, to organise all species into one model like this. Still, the concept of "Fixity of Species" was present - that is, that everything is as it was originally created and never changed.

And for hundreds of years, that was the norm when it came to scientific thought.

This all changed with the Scientific Revolution.

You see, starting in the 16th century, things began happening that changed how science-minded people looked at the world. For one thing, the discovery of the "New World" helped change pre-conceived notions about biodiversity. Over in my homeland of Poland, Copernicus (In Poland we call him Kopernik) challenged the idea of Earth as the centre of the universe. And the invention of the microscope helped people to discover itty bitty organisms that were neither plant nor animal.

None of this stuff was discussed in the Bible. So what do?

Well, friends, I'm going to introduce you to a series of thinkers who tried to figure out the answer to that very question:

John Ray (1627-1705)

English naturalist John Ray provided us with what is known as the Species Concept, i.e. what makes things of the same species? This concept is still widely used today. And the beauty of Ray's Species Concept lies in its simplicity. All it is is this one question:

Who can reproduce with who to have viable (not sterile) offspring?

Carolus Linneaus (1701-1778)

Also known as Carl von Linné, this Swede provided us with the binomial system, or the rules for naming an organism with two names: genus and species. The Genus name is always capitalised, and the species name always lower case. An example? Homo sapiens, of course!

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788)

This French nobleman was a gardener for the king, and the following has been said of him: "Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century." What did he do to deserve such high praise? Well, he noted that there was no such thing as an "ideal" - i.e. there was no "ideal rose" that truly existed, because every rose was just a little bit different. Sometimes, he noted, this variation mattered quite a bit, in even a life or death way! Not always, but sometimes! It seems obvious now, of course. Isn't hindsight bias a bitch?

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802)

No, not infamous Charles Darwin, but this Darwin was good ole Charlie's grandfather. While he was offered a position as naturalist to the king, this Darwin turned it down. His interest in natural science, you see, was just a hobby.

Erasmus Darwin didn't even think about natural selection, but he did think about sexual selection. He thought about it a lot. He thought that everything was driven by sexual selection, and that sexual selection (which is exactly what it sounds like) was the key to species origin.

Weirdly enough, he wrote all his works - even the scientific ones - in poetry format.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)

Lamarck came up with the idea of what is called the "Use-Disuse Theory", which basically is that if you have a trait you use often, it's passed onto offspring. If it's not in use, it's not passed on.

Scientifically, of course, we now know his theory to be wrong. If the genetics are there for a trait, it doesn't matter if you use it or not, it has a fair chance of being passed on. But what he did get right and contribute to what became evolutionary theory is the concept that our environment does determine which traits are used.

I'm including Georges Cuvier (left, 1769-1832) and Charles Lyell (1797-1875) together because their two theories, while completely opposite, are both important. As you might expect, when they were both around at the same time (their lifespans did overlap some), they could not stand each other.

Cuvier is considered the father of paleontology, in that he recognised fossils as past species. However, he was a biblical literalist who explained the fossil records with Catastrophism, i.e. the idea that species died out in catastrophes such as The Flood.

Lyell, on the other hand, was a staunch believer in Uniformitarianism - you don't have to invoke special events to explain the fossil record. Lyell believed that small things added up over time - sort of like erosion - to explain it. He gave us the concept of an "Old Earth", that the Earth is much older than the Bible says. What he said was that it was maybe as old as 70,000 years!

Now, of course, we know the earth to be much older than that, but at the time it was a shocker.

So you see, even before Darwin all these thinkers were observing things around them not quite matching up with a literal interpretation of the Bible, and trying to explain the universe in ways that made sense to them. The Species Concept, sexual vs natural selection, uniformitarianism vs catastrophism, the Use-Disuse Theory... it all came together under the theories of the one, the only...

Aw yiss.  Charles.  Mothafuckin.  Darwin.  (1809-1882)

Charles Darwin came from a fairly wealthy, though not straight-up noble, English family. His father was a medical doctor, his cousin was knight (and arguably the father of statistics), and of course his grandpa Erasmus... well, see above. His mother died when he was young, so he was largely raised by his father and sisters.

Because of his family's rank and the time being what it was, this left Darwin with very few career options. Basically, he could become a doctor, a lawyer, or a clergyman. His interest was in the natural sciences, so what he did originally was go into medicine. Learning about the human body was kind of like learning about the natural world around him, right?

It didn't work out so well. Turned out that Darwin was squeamish. His first time he saw a surgery performed, he felt ill and fled the room. Clearly, medicine was not the path for him, so he dropped out of med school.

He had no interest whatsoever in law, so decided then to go into the clergyman path. He wasn't a particularly religious man (in fact he cut class a lot), but one of the jobs of the clergy was to explain the natural world. So what if they were supposed to explain it by way of Jesus instead of by way of nature? He graduated in 1831.

During his time in school, he had been reading Cuvier and Lyell and his own grandfather as part of his education, but now that he was graduated he really didn't much want to start a parish. What, oh what, was poor Charles Darwin to do?

Enter this guy:

Captain Robert Fitzroy (1805-1865)

Captain Fitzroy planned to map out the coastline of South America, which he had been commissioned to do by the British navy. But he needed a natural scientist on board. Now, Fitzroy was a bit of a snob. He didn't want to have to talk to the commoners on board - you know, his crew - any more than necessary. He wanted a gentleman on board, to do gentlemanly things with. Like play chess and stuff. So he hired Darwin, who agreed to go because it was a good way to procrastinate on that whole "starting a parish" thing he was so iffy on.

Fitzroy was a believer in Phrenology, and was a bit uneasy about the shape of Darwin's skull, but no other gentleman wanted to go along on the long, potentially dangerous voyage, so he accepted him aboard. Interestingly, though we now know Phrenology to be a pseudoscience - or, in layman's terms, a crock of shit - in this case Fitzroy was right to be uneasy. He and Darwin did not get along at all.

The Voyage of the Beagle took 5 years. The entire time, Darwin was writing letters to his family, friends, former professors, etc. - and unbeknownst to him, some of these letters were being published and causing a bit of a stir. He came back to England famous, so he published the diary of the voyage and was accepted as a member of the Royal Society.

Darwin began thinking about the Origin of Species around the 1840s but he didn't publish it until 1859. So what lead him to finally do so?

THIS GUY! (1823-1913)

Alfred Wallace, if Darwin can be called the father of evolution, I guess would be evolution's... stepfather? Crazy uncle? Whichever, Wallace and Darwin both came to independent conclusions about evolutionary theory. Much like Darwin in South America, Wallace had recently been on a voyage to Indonesia and had noticed things similar to what Darwin had in the Americas. (Such as members of the same species varying greatly in certain traits between islands.) Wallace had also come to a conclusion of the "Origin of Species Theory" with a concept of Natural Selection.

Now, it should be made clear to all the Wallace apologists, that Darwin had come up with his theory first. Besides, Wallace did not include plants in his theory, and emphasized interspecies competition. Darwin emphasized intraspecies competition - that is, competition between individuals of the same species, better known to us now as that whole "Survival of the Fittest" thing.

Darwin and Wallace met in 1858 and presented together at the Royal Society. After that, Darwin felt compelled to publish. His On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. As it was published for the common reader rather than a purely scientific audience, it caused quite a stir, even though man is only mentioned once in the whole book.

This was not the case with his next book, Descent of Man in 1871, which did focus on human evolution. Darwin didn't give a fuck about controversy. He was a man of science, damn it!

His last book, in 1881, was The Emotions in Man and Animals, which dealt with behavioural science.

"SCIENCE, MOTHERFUCKER!"

And now, because I don't really know how to close this out and because I glean some of you may have misunderstandings about how evolution works (NO WE DID NOT DESCEND FROM MONKEYS DAMN IT. NO. THAT IS NOT HOW IT WORKS.), I now present you...

~Natural Selection in 8 Easy Steps!~

1. Organisms can produce more offspring than they can care for.
2. Variation exists.
3. Competition is always present.
4. Some variations are more favourable than others when it comes to competing for resources.
5. The environment itself is the selecting agent (as to what is competed for and all that jazz).
6. Traits must be inherited.
7. It takes a looooooong time for these changes to change an existing species into two or more new ones.
8. But you can speed up the evolutionary process by isolation

I hope this was as interesting to someone out there as it is to me!

~Nym