Although evolutionary theory was proposed before Darwin, he is credited with systematizing it and making it widely accepted. Lamarck’s advances, Darwin’s theory of natural selection, neo-Darwinism, and genetic research have all contributed to the progressive development of evolutionary theory. However, evolutionary theory still faces controversy with creationism, especially the debate over the origin of life and “great evolution”. Evolutionary theory will continue to evolve and expand our understanding of the origins of life as more discoveries are made.
There were certainly people before Darwin who argued for evolution, and they existed. But why do we recognize Darwin as the first proponent of evolution? In this article, we’re going to take a closer look at the theory of evolution, including its origins and development, its specifics, and how it compares to other theories. Before we get started, let’s define evolutionary theory and the scope of this article. Evolutionary theory can have a narrow and a broad meaning: the narrow definition refers to theories about the factors that cause biological evolution, while the broad definition refers to the field of study that studies the evolution of living things. In this article, we’re talking about the former.
In the middle of the 18th century, signs of a new science began to emerge in France. The dissemination of Newtonian mechanics, which established the concept of causal change in nature, led to changes that were like the unfolding of a giant blueprint. From Maupertuis, who wrote about the principle of natural selection, to Corac, who argued that humans are the product of historical changes in nature, we can see that the attempts of several scientists were beginning to emerge that were different from the creationist ideas of the time. However, they did not fully understand the blueprints of the new theory of evolution. Lamarck was the first to systematically organize the theory of evolution and fully implement its blueprint. Lamarck argued that “all living things evolve toward more complex and complete forms,” a property he called “progressivity” and identified as the main cause of evolution. He also proposed the “solubility theory” of evolution, which states that organs that are used frequently develop and organs that are not used degenerate.
However, it was Charles Robert Darwin (C.R. Darwin) who actually finalized and popularized the theory of evolution from a schematic diagram. The Darwin we know is Charles Robert Darwin, author of The Origin of Species, and his grandfather E. Darwin, but all subsequent references to Darwin will be to C.R. Darwin. Darwin rejected Lamarck’s theory of dissolution and emphasized natural selection, based on mutability and its inheritance and the finite nature of resources, as the primary cause of evolution. The principle of natural selection is that the best survive over time. Although Lamarck and Darwin argued differently, the theory of evolution was introduced to the world for the first time.
Just as guns have been improved and developed in various forms, evolutionary theory has continued to evolve even after Lamarck and Darwin. Along the way, various theories have emerged. For example, Wagner and Gulick, who emphasized the importance of geographical isolation in speciation; Negeli and Eimer, who focused on the study of the direction of evolution; Kopp, who proposed neo-Lamarckism, which argued that evolution occurs as a result of the cumulative inheritance of acquired traits; Weismann, who proposed neo-Darwinism, which added genetic concepts to Darwin’s theory of evolution; and Mendel, famous for his pea experiment. In particular, Weismann’s germplasm lectures and the rediscovery of Mendelianism in the 1900s had a profound impact on genetics. Weismann’s view that it is the germplasm that is inherited across generations, and not somatic qualities, provided the basis for rejecting Lamarck’s idea that acquired traits are inherited. Mendel’s theory of genetics was based on extensive experimental and statistical data and contributed greatly to the development of chromosomal theory.
In the 1930s, an attempt to synthesize evolutionary theory began with Dobzhansky’s book Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937). The main content of the synthesis was to organize and expand the concepts of paleontology and biology around the chromosome theory, population genetics, and the concept of species, to deny the inheritance of acquired traits, to explain the gradualness of the evolutionary process and mutation, and to assert that the direction of evolution is subject to natural selection. These attempts emphasized the indispensability of evolutionary explanations in biology and marked a new starting point for evolutionary research. From the 1960s onward, advances in microscopy and analytical techniques, as well as research achievements, accelerated the development of evolutionary theory, leading to a number of controversies. These include the debate over whether evolution is regular and gradual or irregular and radical, and whether the unit of natural selection is an individual, a population, or a gene. In particular, the debate over the unit of natural selection has been a central debate in evolutionary theory from the time when genes were not discovered to the time when they were discovered. Darwin argued for an individual-centered theory, Lorenz, Wynne Edwards, Wilson, and others argued for group selection, and Hamilton and Dawkins argued for a gene theory, a debate that continues to this day among prominent scholars.
So far, we’ve outlined the history of evolutionary theory and compared the different theories within it. However, while the debate between these theories presupposes that evolutionary theory is correct, there is a larger range of debates that take place without such a presupposition. The debate with theories other than evolution, most notably creationism, has been going on since the beginning of evolutionary theory. We’ll start explaining this now.
Like other big scientific theories, evolution started out with great opposition. Like the geocentrism that denied the theory of the earth’s rotation, creationism denied evolution, claiming that the idea that our ancestors were not Adam and Eve was a blasphemy against the Bible. Since even religious authority cannot deny scientifically proven facts, the theory of perpetual motion was abandoned by religions such as Christianity, and Adam and Eve, who were accepted as the ancestors of mankind, were also accepted in a symbolic sense as it was proved that the earth and mankind existed 6000 years before they were born. However, creationism didn’t disappear, and it is still debated by evolutionists to this day. This is because evolutionary theory can explain microevolution, which is the development within a species, but it cannot explain macroevolution, which is the divergence from species to species. Modern creationism is now more than just a religious claim, it has some theories based on science and actually accepts microevolution. Thus, the main differences between modern creationism and evolution are whether life was created in the first place and whether species evolve from species to species. There are many different theories within creationism, and there are also attempts to merge the two by introducing the concept of creative evolution, but this is not relevant to the topic of this article, which is evolution.
No theory is perfect. Even Newtonian mechanics, which seemed to fit so well with empirical evidence and common sense, has been shown to be incomplete by quantum mechanics and relativity, and quantum mechanics and relativity have incompatible contradictions, meaning that at least one or both of them must be wrong. Even math that has been proven to be eternally true still has unresolved problems where it has not been proven. But just as a test score that isn’t a perfect 100 is not meaningless, a theory that isn’t perfect still has a purpose. All theories evolve. Likewise, theories about the origin of life, including evolution, will continue to evolve as remaining questions are addressed through rediscovery, new theories emerge, and discoveries are made as science advances. This will allow us to learn more about the past.
