Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published on 24 November 1859. It is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. The book presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Ideas about the transmutation of species were controversial as they conflicted with the beliefs that species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy.
About On the Origin of Species in brief
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published on 24 November 1859. It is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. The book presented a body of evidence that the diversity of life arose by common descent through a branching pattern of evolution. Ideas about the transmutation of species were controversial as they conflicted with the beliefs that species were unchanging parts of a designed hierarchy. The political and theological implications were intensely debated, but transmutation was not accepted by the scientific mainstream. The debate over the book contributed to the campaign by T.H. Huxley and his fellow members of the X Club to secularise science by promoting scientific naturalism. Darwin’s concept of evolutionary adaptation through natural selection became central to modern evolutionary theory, and it has now become the unifying concept of the life sciences. In later editions of the book, Darwin traced evolutionary ideas as far back as Aristotle; the text he cites is a summary by Aristotle of the ideas of the earlier Greek philosopher Empedocles. In 1766, Georges Buffon suggested that some similar species, such as horses and asses, or lions, tigers, and leopards, might be varieties descended from a common ancestor. After the turmoil of the English Civil War, the Royal Society wanted to show that science did not threaten religious and political stability. John Ray developed an influential natural theology of rational order; in his taxonomy, species were static and fixed, their adaptation and complexity designed by God, and varieties showed minor differences caused by local conditions. The Protestant Reformation inspired a literal interpretation of the Bible, with concepts of creation that conflicted with findings of an emerging science seeking explanations congruent with the mechanical philosophy of René Descartes and the empiricism of the Baconian method.
Geoffroy Geoffroy contended that embryonic development recapitulated transformations of organisms in past eras when the environment acted on embryos. In 1809, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck envisaged that spontaneous generation produced simple life that progressively developed greater complexity, adapting to the environment by inheriting changes in adults. This process was later called Lamarckism. In the 1930s and 1940s, Darwin’s theory of evolution became the central concept in evolutionary theory. Within two decades there was widespread scientific agreement that evolution, with a branchingpattern of common descent, had occurred, but scientists were slow to give natural selection the significance that Darwin thought appropriate. Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin outlined a hypothesis of the transmutations of species in the 1790s, and he developed a more developed theory in the 1809s of the use or use or disuse of the more developed species in 1809 and 1809. He also proposed a theory of spontaneous generation that produced simple forms that progressively develop greater complexity in parallel but separate lineages with no separate extinction with no parallel lineages. The theory was later used to explain the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1950s and 1960s. The concept of evolution is now the most widely accepted in biology.
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