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2000 •
Darwin’s ideas on variation, heredity, and development differ significantly from twentieth-century views. First, Darwin held that environmental changes, acting either on the reproductive organs or the body, were necessary to generate variation. Second, heredity was a developmental, not a transmissional, process; variation was a change in the developmental process of change.An analysis of Darwin’s elaboration and modification of these two positions from his early notebooks (1836–1844) to the last edition of the Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication(1875) complements previous Darwin scholarship on these issues. Included in this analysis is a description of the way Darwin employed the distinction between transmission and development, as well as the conceptual relationship he saw between heredity and variation. This paper is part of a larger project comparing commitments regarding variation during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
2015 •
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is best known for his major contributions to evolutionary theory. In 1859, Darwin published his theory of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution in his revolutionary book On the Origin of Species. This book provided compelling evidence overcoming the scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species. The basic principles of his theory have been shown to be correct and are now widely accepted as the basis of mainstream zoology, botany and ecology. On the other hand, in a later book Darwin got it wrong with the mechanisms of inheritance. The empirical rules of genetics, based solely on observational results, were largely understood since Gregor Mendel’s ‘wrinkled pea’ experiments in the 1860s. The postulated units of inheritance were called genes, but in Charles Darwin’s time it was not understood where genes were located in the body or what they physically consisted of. Darwin knew that there must have been a physical mechanism for inheritance, but his speculations about it – called pangenesis – were incorrect. Fortunately for the credibility of his theory of evolution by natural selection, he published these speculations later in a separate 1868 book titled Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication.
Mutation Research/Reviews in Mutation Research
How fruit flies came to launch the chromosome theory of heredity2013 •
Many studies have shown that students' understanding of evolution is low and some sort of historical approach would be necessary in order to allow students to understand the theory of evolution. It is common to present Mendelian genetics to high school students prior to Biological Evolution, having in mind historical and epistemological assumptions regarding connections between the works of Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin. It is often said that Darwin 'lacked' a theory of heredity and, therefore, he had not been able to produce the synthetic theory of evolution himself. Thus, schools could provide a prior basis for heredity, so that students could begin to study evolution with a proper background in genetics. We intend to review some research on the history of biology, attempting to show that, even if Darwin had had notice of Mendel's works – which we think he did – he would not have changed his views on heredity. We examine this belief and its possible origins, offer some considerations about Darwin's views on heredity, including his knowledge of the 3:1 ratio, the consequences for the work on Nature of Science (NOS), and finally give five reasons to consider alternative possibilities for curriculum development.
Both Darwin and Wallace tried to find the challenge that triggers new species: for Darwin this was the ‘competition between populations’, in Wallace's opinion the most important factor was ‘a change in the environment’. Both of them tried to show that their theory had two major consequences in the general knowledge of species: (1) the fact that all species adapt by progress (improvement) and (2) the fact that new species would branch out from old species, characteristics of the last being increasingly different from each other. The attempts of the two writers show a great deal of ‘explanatory responsibility’ (Jonathan Hodge’s formula). And this explanatory responsibility turned into beautiful imaginary examples. This paper will try to show (in a nutshell) the method Darwin used to fill in explanatory gaps in the theory of the evolution of species: he took it over from Thomas Malthus, the father of social sciences, he adapted it according to Charles Lyell’s principles and he gave it the shape of imaginatory illustrations.
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