Organic Change example essay topic

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) Today, the name of Lamarck is associated merely with a discredited theory of heredity, the 'inheritance of acquired traits. ' However, Charles Darwin, Lyell, Haeckel, and other early evolutionists acknowledged him as a great zoologist and as a forerunner of evolution. To be fair to Lamarck, we should mention that since the time of Linnaeus, few naturalists had considered the invertebrates worthy of study. The word 'invertebrates' did not even exist at the time; Lamarck coined it.

The invertebrate collections at the Mus " ee were enormous and rapidly growing, but poorly organized and classified. Although the professors at the Mus " ee were theoretically equal in rank, the professorship of 'insects and worms' was definitely the least prestigious. But Lamarck took on the enormous challenge of learning -- and creating -- a new field of biology. The sheer number and diversity of invertebrates proved to be both a challenge and a rich source of knowledge.

What Lamarck actually believed was more complex: organisms are not passively altered by their environment. Instead, a change in the environment causes changes in the needs of organisms living in that environment, which in turn causes changes in their behavior. Altered behavior leads to greater or lesser use of a given structure or organ; use would cause the structure to increase in size over several generations, whereas disuse would cause it to shrink or even disappear. This rule -- that use or disuse causes structures to enlarge or shrink -- Lamarck called the 'First Law' in his book Philosophie.

Lamarck's 'Second Law's t ated that all such changes were heritable. The result of these laws was the continuous, gradual change of all organisms, as they became adapted to their environments; the physiological needs of organisms, created by their interactions with the environment, drive Lamarckian evolution. Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) Carl Linnaeus, also known as Carl von Linn'e or Carolus Linnaeus, is often called the Father of Taxonomy. His system for naming, ranking, and classifying organisms is still in wide use today (with many changes).

Erasmus Darwin He did discuss ideas that his grandson elaborated on sixty years later, such as how life evolved from a single common ancestor, forming 'one living filament'. He wrestled with the question of how one species could evolve into another. Although some of his ideas on how evolution might occur are quite close to those of Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin also talked about how competition and sexual selection could cause changes in species Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) Malthus's observation that in nature plants and animals produce far more offspring than can survive, and that Man too is capable of overproducing if left unchecked. Malthus concluded that unless family size was regulated, man's misery of famine would become globally epidemic and eventually consume Man. Malthus' view that poverty and famine were natural outcomes of population growth and food supply was not popular among social reformers who believed that with proper social structures, all ills of man could be eradicated. Malthus was a political economist who was concerned about, what he saw as, the decline of living conditions in nineteenth century England.

He blamed this decline on three elements: The overproduction of young; the inability of resources to keep up with the rising human population; and the irresponsibility of the lower classes. To combat this, Malthus suggested the family size of the lower class ought to be regulated such that poor families do not produce more children than they can support. Does this sound familiar? China has implemented such a measure on family size!

Buffon (1707-1788) It is not the average person who questions two thousand years of dogma, but that is what Buffon did: 100 years before Darwin, Buffon, in his Historie Naturelle, a 44 volume encyclopedia describing everything known about the natural world, wrestled with the similarities of humans and apes and even talked about common ancestry of Man and apes. Although Buffon believed in organic change, he did not provide a coherent mechanism for such changes. He thought that the environment acted directly on organisms through what he called 'organic particles'. Buffon also published Les E poques de la Nature (1788) where he openly suggested that the planet was much older than the 6,000 years proclaimed by the church, and discussed concepts very similar to Charles Lyell's 'uniformitarianism' which were formulated 40 years later. Sir Charles Lyell Lyell conclusively showed that the earth was very old and had changed its form slowly, mainly from conditions such as erosion. Lyell was able to date the ages of rocks by using fossils embedded in the stone as time indicators.

Charles Darwin made use of Lyell's data on fossils for his theory of evolution. Lyell himself had believed that the various species of plants and animals had remained unchanged since they were created. When confronted with Darwin's findings, he admitted 'I now realize I have been looking down the wrong road. ' He became one of Darwin's strongest supporters. William Paley Paley laid out a full exposition of natural theology, the belief that the nature of God could be understood by reference to His creation, the natural world. Darwin took from his reading of Paley a belief in adaptation -- that organisms are somehow fit for the environments in which they live, that their structure reflects the functions they perform throughout their lives.

Where natural theology ran into trouble was in explaining the many cases of apparent pain, waste, and cruelty in the living world: why would a benevolent Designer have made cats play with mice before killing them, or parasites that eat their hosts from the inside? Paley struggled to reconcile the apparent cruelty and indifference of nature with his belief in a good God, and finally concluded that the joys of life simply outweighed its sorrows. Where Darwin departed from Paley was in his concept of natural selection as a process that could produce adaptation and design without the all-encompassing intervention of a benevolent Designer..