Charles Darwin's Early Life and Evolutionary Theory: Facts, Pathways, and Mechanisms, Papers of History of Science and Technology

Download Charles Darwin's Early Life and Evolutionary Theory: Facts, Pathways, and Mechanisms and more Papers History of Science and Technology in PDF only on Docsity! 9/10/2008 1 1809 – 1882 Darwin @ 72 “It is absurd for human beings ... to hope that perhaps some day another Newton might arise who would explain to us, in terms of natural laws unordered by any intention, how even a mere blade of grass is produced.” Critique of Judgment, 1790  Fact ◦ We can readily see the effects of gravity  Pathway ◦ We can use Newtonian dynamics to describe the path of bodies  Mechanism ◦ What causes gravitational attraction?  Fact ◦ We can see change over time observable in fossil record and in “real time”  Pathway ◦ We can describe what changes into what and the resulting “tree of life”  Mechanism ◦ What causes evolutionary change?  Darwinian natural selection?  Other mechanisms?  Apparent Design ◦ Adaptation  Diversity  Extinction 9/10/2008 2 7  Primary: Pure internal drive  Secondary: Branching due to inheritance of acquired characteristics (adaptation to changing conditions) ◦ Change in environment brings ◦ Change in “needs” (besoins), brings ◦ Change in behavior, brings ◦ Change in organ usage and development, brings ◦ Change in form over time - EVOLUTION!  Founder of Wedgwood pottery works in Etruria, Staffordshire.  Friend of Joseph Priestly and other members of the “Lunar Club”  Socially respectable - supporter of philanthropic, scientific and artistic causes ORGANIC LIFE beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass; These, as successive generations bloom, New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.  Physician, FRS 1788  Financially astute ◦ Investment and money-broking  Whig - critical of aristocracy  Born February 12th 1809  Second son of Robert Darwin and Susannah Wedgwood.  Named after deceased uncle.  Marianne  Charlotte Sarah  Susan Elizabeth  Erasmus Alvey  Charles Robert  Emily Catherine Darwin @ 7 years 9/10/2008 5  The Zoology of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle (1838-‟42)  Journal of Researches (1839)  Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (1842)  Geological Observations on Volcanic Islands (1844)  Geological Observations on South America (1846) Darwin @ 30  Series of notebooks started in July „37 (Zoonomia)  “Life sprawled through time, budding and branching like a tree - erupting in new species adapted to slowly changing environments.” 9/10/2008 6 Married Emma Wedgwood in 1839 ◦ William Erasmus (1839) ◦ Anne Elizabeth (1841) ◦ Mary Eleanor (1842) ◦ Henrietta Emma (1843) ◦ George Howard (1845) ◦ Elizabeth (1847) ◦ Francis (1848) ◦ Leonard (1850) ◦ Horace (1854) ◦ Charles Waring (1856) “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant” (1877) Mind Darwin @ 33 (1842)  1837: Notebooks  1842: Pencil Sketch (35 pp.)  1844: Essay (240 pp.) ◦ Shares idea with Joseph Hooker  1843 – 51: Work on barnacles  1856 – 58: Natural Selection (unfinished) Darwin @ 40 “What a book a devil‟s chaplain could write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature” 9/10/2008 7 “With respect to the theological view of the question: This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically, but I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars or that a cat should play with mice... On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance.” Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals Darwin @ 62 Darwin in Oxford