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Charles Darwin in 1868. Darwinism is a term used to describe a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others. The theory states that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.
Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution is a 1959 biography of Charles Darwin by the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. [1] The book has been praised for its historical research but heavily criticized for attacking the theory of natural selection. [2] [3] [4]
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept ...
The following approaches can all be seen as exemplifying a generalization of Darwinian ideas outside of their original domain of biology. These "Darwinian extensions" can be grouped in two categories, depending on whether they discuss implications of biological (genetic) evolution in other disciplines (e.g. medicine or psychology), or discuss processes of variation and selection of entities ...
Darwin accepted blending inheritance, but Fleeming Jenkin calculated that as it mixed traits, natural selection could not accumulate useful traits. Darwin tried to meet these objections in the fifth edition. Mivart supported directed evolution, and compiled scientific and religious objections to natural selection. In response, Darwin made ...
Karl Popper's (1945) book The Open Society and its Enemies presents an evolutionary approach to political philosophy, [27] as does David Sloan Wilson's (2019) book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution. The Handbook of Biology and Politics (2017) [28] examines biopolitics and the intersection of evolutionary biology and ...
To explain these relationships, Darwin said that all living things were related, and this meant that all life must be descended from a few forms, or even from a single common ancestor. He called this process descent with modification. [16] Darwin published his theory of evolution by natural selection in On the Origin of Species in 1859. [18]
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is a 1995 book by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author looks at some of the repercussions of Darwinian theory. The crux of the argument is that, whether or not Darwin's theories are overturned, there is no going back from the dangerous idea that design (purpose or what ...