Charles Darwin and the evolution of species - From the origins to Darwinism

Marco Casella

Charles Darwin and the evolution of species - From the origins to Darwinism

UUID: 333ce832-b95c-11e5-86e1-119a1b5d0361

This ebook was created with StreetLib Write (http://write.streetlib.com)

by Simplicissimus Book Farm

Table of contents

A brief history

Geology and religious tradition in England

The English evolutionists before Darwin

Charles Darwin and the voyage aboard the Beagle

On the origin of species

The philosophical meaning of Darwin’s work

The man’s origin

Conclusions

A brief history

The most important contribution given by science in the 19th century to a new philosophical conception of nature and man is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Alvar Ellegård states that thanks to this author

« the Epicurean and Lucretian picture of a fortuitous concourse of atoms giving rise to the world as we see it was changed from a patently absurd speculation to an eminently plausible hypothesis. There might indeed be room for a Creator and Designer in this theory – but there was no need for one. »

When Charles Darwin’s On the origin of species appeared in 1859, the idea of evolution of organisms wasn’t surely new. Many authors had been supporting and discussing it for about a century without obtaining a sufficient scientific credibility for it.

In the second half of the 18th century, especially in France, a historical and dynamical vision of nature was opposed to the initial conception of the natural scale that saw a fixed and static reality in any living form. A materialistic cosmology had already been outlined in Telliamed’s scientific and mythological tale that also included living forms in its transformations. In his great work, Buffon had developed the idea of a historicity of nature refusing the biblical cosmogony that fixed in six thousand years the period of time passed since the beginning of the world. Maupertuis had outlined a genial hypothesis on organisms’ evolution. However, Buffon, analyzing this possibility on more points of his work, stated that evolution’s hypothesis wasn’t proved enough by facts. The idea of a continuous transformation of beings had to find a convinced supporter in Diderot, who saw in it a necessary consequence of his materialistic conception according to which all the reality is involved in a perpetual flow of changes.

This idea of livings’ transformation was linked to the conception that matter had a continuous and autonomous creation capability and the spontaneous generation, newly supported for the more simple organisms by various authors of this period, seemed to be one of the most convincing proofs of this conception.

However, the idea of a renewed production of living forms in the various epochs of nature had to be elaborated more successfully by some authors who attempted to reconcile it with the traditional creationism refusing the materialistic conception. While following a different scientific and philosophical position, Robinet and Bonnet admitted, for instance, a following appearance of new forms of organisms in the past periods of the Earth. However, these organisms didn’t result of the modification of previous organisms but of seeds all created at the beginning of the world and only developed at the proper time.

Bonnet particularly attempted to reconcile the idea of rise and perfecting of nature with that of a single creation act that didn’t require a following intervention of God in the world. Lamarck had to develop his large and deepened evolution theory at the beginning of the 19th century, without taking care to save creationism. Following the thought of many Enlightenment thinkers, according to him nature is an autonomous order of reality that can only realize God’s plan according to his laws.

According to Lamarck, this plan involves a gradual and progressive perfecting of organism destined to culminate in man and it is realized by a necessary trend of the living matter to be differentiated in increasingly complex forms that follow an uniform and ordered plan. The actual and different circumstances when organisms are create in them the need to be adapted and modified taking functions and forms that partly get far from that plan. Therefore, descendants are handed down both the result of the necessary and ordered differentiation of the living matter and the result of the adaptations produced in the various circumstances by the use or non-use of given organs.

The topics of the Enlightenments’ naturalism and the idea of a progressive perfecting of forms, that realize their rise in time along the natural scale, became known far and wide in Germany in Herder’s work