Tag: Darwin

Mr. Darwin Can’t Get a Break

 

It can’t be easy to be Charles Darwin right now. (I mean, for reasons beyond the obvious.) A meticulous researcher and a serious and deeply respectful man, Mr. Darwin spent years carefully documenting and refining his seminal* theory of evolution through natural selection, delaying its presentation until similar discoveries by fellow British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace prompted him to go public and secure his claim as the father of evolutionary theory.

(And what is it with our British cousins, that they should produce simultaneously two men of such insight?)

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Nobody in academia had ever witnessed or even heard of a performance like this before. In just five years, 1953– 57, a University of Pennsylvania graduate student— a student, in his twenties— had taken over an entire field of study, linguistics, and stood it on its head and hardened it from a spongy so-called social […]

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If you’ve spent much time online I’m sure you’ve seen references to the “Darwin Awards” which routinely honor some benighted soul who, through a lack of wisdom and foresight, manages to take himself out of the gene pool (or nearly so) in some particularly painful, though humorous means. (Example here.) We forget at our peril […]

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Darwin Was Wrong…

 

shutterstock_133811405…and Lamarck was right.

Well, maybe. Of the two major theories of human evolution developed in the 19th century, Darwin believed in natural selection — that human traits are passed along through DNA and not through environmental factors — and Lamarck believed that parents can transmit environmentally acquired traits.

Darwin won the sweepstakes, but Lamarck may not have been entirely wrong. From ArsTechnica: