>Susan: A young Charles Darwin who knew nothing about common descent got on
a boat and went out into the world. He collected hundreds of crates of
specimens.
He made thousands of observations which he carefully wrote down in his
notebooks. After a while all those observations started to make a pattern.
When IDists and other creationists start to do that and risk having their
sacrosanct conclusion contradicted, they will begin to have some respect in
the scientific community.
DNAunion: Interesting, but as a side note on Darwin, he was hardly trotting
off into new territory when he published his work.
Obviously, evolution had already been written about - by Larmarck.
Moreoever, many people began opposing the fixity of species in their works a
long time before Darwin ever published his "Origin of Species": some from
1795, some from the 1820's, and some from the 1830's. In addition, papers on
common descent were published
in the 1850's before Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published.
Furthermore, someone wrote on descent with modification in 1846, and another
in 1859 (at about the same time as Darwin). Also, the struggle for existence
- that more organisms are born than can survive, leading to a struggle for
existence - was written about before Darwin's book. And even natural
selection was written about in the 1810's.
Boy, that Darwin sure was a pioneer blazing a new trail, wasn' t he?
*******************************
Charles Darwin, from the "Origin of Species":
"From the facts alluded to in the first chapter, I think there can be no
doubt that use in our domestic animals has strengthened and enlarged certain
parts, and disuse diminished them; and that such modifications are inherited."
"The evidence that accidental mutilations can be inherited is at present not
decisive; but the remarkable cases observed by Brown-Sequard in guinea pigs,
of the inherited effects of operations, should make us cautious in denying
this tendency."
"I say within a dozen or twenty generations, for no instance is known of
crossed descendants reverting to an ancestor of foreign blood, removed by a
greater number of generations. In a breed which has been crossed only once,
the tendency to revert to any character derived from such a cross will
naturally become less and less, as in each succeeding generations there will
less of the foreign blood…"
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