If I had to choose who was the most influential to Charles Darwin I would say it would be Thomas Malthus. Thomas Malthus was not a scientist but he was an economist and that helped him understand how population grew and declined.
Malthus work help support Darwin when he said that, "Survival to the fittest." Malthus understood that if the population was growing faster the resources were growing then the people will die. Malthus blamed three things for the decline of the living conditions that were happening. The first one would be the reproduction that wasn't controlled and the second is that we were going to out grow our resources with too much reproducing. And the third is the lower class having too many kids that they could not care for and didn't have enough resources.
This helped Darwin construct the theory of Natural Selection all this was left out until he read "Essay on the Principle of Population.
This can agree with many of the bullet point that our professor made in the instructions like all organisms can reproduce, limited resources, better access to the resources leads to more success, and individuals do not evolve the population does. Darwin put his idea together after reading and understanding what Malthus was saying. If it wasn't for Malthus Darwin would have had a broken piece of Natural Selection. There would be a big chunk of it missing.
The attitude of the church had a huge affect on Darwin's publishing his book and to even talk about it. Like the video said Darwin would only tell his brother the things he found out and the things he was working on to improve his hypothesis because he was afraid for his families name in town and also his name. He was a very well known individual. Even with Darwin being afraid he still didn't let that stop him. He still continued to learn more and ask more but it did take him 20 years to publish his book and I think that is because he couldn't get over the fear of what was going to happen after that.
-Thank you
Rouba Khzam
Source:
http://evolution.about.com/od/scientists/p/Thomas-Malthus.htm
In general, good background on Malthus' work.
ReplyDeleteOnly some of those bullet points are from Malthus himself, such as the issue of limited resources and organisms reproduce exponentially. The others are questions that arose after Darwin read Malthus' work and started considering the implications of limited resources and competition on a natural, diverse population. Who gets those resources? Is it random or is it a pattern? The answer was natural selection: the environment (nature) chooses who gets the resources based upon who has the adaptations that best fit that environment.
I always hesitate about giving too much credit to any one scientist (or theoretician) for their influence over another person's work. Are they really that indispensable? But for Malthus (and also Lyell), I actually do wonder it Darwin could have put all the piece together without the key questions Malthus provided.
Good final discussion. I appreciate hearing what you learned from the video in the assignment folder and I'm glad you found that it applied to your work here.
Good first post.