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Julian Huxley used the phrase "the eclipse of Darwinism" [a] to describe the state of affairs prior to what he called the "modern synthesis". During the "eclipse", evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles but relatively few biologists believed that natural selection was its primary mechanism.
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.
Charles Robert Darwin (/ ˈ d ɑːr w ɪ n / [5] DAR-win; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, [6] widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology.
Henry Plotkin in his 1997 book [19] on Darwin machines makes the link between universal Darwinism and Campbell's evolutionary epistemology. Susan Blackmore, in her 1999 book The Meme Machine, devotes a chapter titled 'Universal Darwinism' to a discussion of the applicability of the Darwinian process to a wide range of scientific subject matters.
[17] [19] Darwinian biologists freely admit that physical factors such as surface tension can cause self-assembly, but insist that genes play a crucial role. They note for example that deep homologies between widely separated groups of organisms, such as the signalling pathways and transcription factors of choanoflagellates and metazoans ...
A Darwin machine (a 1987 coinage by William H. Calvin, by analogy to a Turing machine) is a machine that, like a Turing machine, involves an iteration process that yields a high-quality result, but, whereas a Turing machine uses logic, the Darwin machine uses rounds of variation, selection, and inheritance.
Darwin tried at a gathering at Downe on 22 April 1856 to amiably argue Huxley and Hooker round towards accepting evolution as a process, without going into the mechanism. Darwin intended to write human beings into Natural Selection through mid-1857. But his work required a tremendous amount of evidence and facts.
Darwin's observations led him to view transmutation as a process of divergence and branching, rather than the ladder-like progression envisioned by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and others. In 1838 he read the new sixth edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population , written in the late 18th century by Thomas Robert Malthus.