Premium
Setting the scene… meeting up with Darwin and Wallace
Author(s) -
LOXDALE HUGH D.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
ecological entomology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.865
H-Index - 81
eISSN - 1365-2311
pISSN - 0307-6946
DOI - 10.1111/j.1365-2311.2009.01139.x
Subject(s) - natural selection , darwin (adl) , magnum opus , biology , charles darwin , natural (archaeology) , selection (genetic algorithm) , genealogy , origin of species , construct (python library) , environmental ethics , darwinism , epistemology , evolutionary biology , history , philosophy , paleontology , computer science , software engineering , artificial intelligence , programming language
1. In 1858 the theory of evolution by means of natural selection was born. By the time of the publication of the two papers by Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882) and Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), Darwin was already a well established and respected scientist who had been thinking about evolution for a long time, at least since his world voyage in HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836. In contrast, as far as science and the general public was then concerned, Wallace was comparatively unknown and largely an outsider. Yet he too independently developed a theory of evolution involving the mechanism of natural selection, following his travels to the Far East in the years 1854–1862 to collect and observe animal and, to a lesser extent, plant life. It could thus be argued that this was a theory whose time had come, and perhaps others would have developed such a theory shortly afterwards, certainly by the end of the 19th century. However, Darwin and Wallace got there first, especially Darwin who in the following year, 1859, published his magnum opus – On the Origin of Species . Their convincing and courageous theoretical explanation of how nature adaptively radiates and evolves under the influence of natural selection is now generally accepted by most biologists and many others worldwide. As such, it provides a logical construct of how organisms develop, compete, survive within established ecological niches, and adapt to new ones… or not as the case may be, whereupon individuals, populations, and indeed whole taxonomic groups, become extinct over time.