I would have to say that Alfred Russel Wallace who had the most influence on darwin on natural selection. The Contribution that wallace made to the science community took place when he ventured to the amazon river. With the opportunity of having unique and vast amount of plant and animals wallace discovered unique traits of certain animals and plants. Some of the traits the animals presented were the ability to camouflage when preditors are near and plants that had variety of mechanisims to fight off insects.
"If the environment changes, the traits that are helpful or adaptive to that environment will be
different". This point affected Alfred wallaces work. For when looked at the wallace effect and how it notices certain species of plants and animals correlate into their enviorments and avoid to mate hybridly to avoid the sure higher reproduction rate.
With both of them venturing the world, Darwin more than wallace its said that they both developed the theory of natural selection, which would later be joined. But wallace had a big influence on darwin, for if not for wallace sharing his work with darwin, he would of never had published it.
The additude of the church affected him amd his release of his book, due to the anger and contraversy it would of caused towards the theory of evolution. THe church being a holy place that believes in the bible and gods word and oly his, viewed darwin and his theories to be naive. The discouragment of the church towards darwin despaired him, but with the gradual help of wallace, darwin released his book regardless of what other thought.
Hi Erick,
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post and, although I disagree with your conclusion that Wallace was the greatest influence on Darwin, I do believe that he was a crucial force in Darwin’s development of his Theory of Evolution. From the sources I read, my understanding is that these two men often worked together. They corroborated and confirmed many ideas and hypotheses with one another. This may not sound terribly important, but when you are working on the most controversial theory of all time, you definitely require substantiation of your work by other respected individuals in the scientific community. Alfred Russel Wallace was certainly that respected individual that Darwin relied on heavily. To me, Jean Baptiste Lamarck who was first to suggest humans evolved from a lower species, and Thomas Malthus who proved overpopulation leads to the “survival of the fittest” seem to have the greatest influence on the formation of Darwin’s actual theory. Wallace, however, became instrumental in Darwin’s decision to finally go public with his findings.
While I agree that Wallace's contributions to the scientific community were extensive, for the purpose of this assignment, we needed to know about Wallace's work that most likely influenced Darwin. A discussion of Wallace's own theory of natural selection was important to include here.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your choice of bullet points, but isn't it fair to suggest that since both Wallace and Darwin developed essentially the same theory of natural selection, then ALL of the bullet points would apply equally to both theories?
"But wallace had a big influence on darwin, for if not for wallace sharing his work with darwin, he would of never had published it."
I completely agree with this. Wallace did provide empirical support and acted as a sounding board for Darwin, but perhaps his greatest contribution was the impetus Darwin needed to actually publish his work.
Actually, the church didn't know about his work until he published, so they wouldn't have been pushing back yet. But Darwin delayed for more than 20 years before publishing. Why? What were his concerns? And what role might the church have played in his decision to delay, even if they weren't directly discouraging him?