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Charles Darwin's Theory Of Natural Selection

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Although Charles Darwin is credited for the theory of natural selection, many scientific ‘giants’ influenced the direction of Darwin’s thinking. Since the beginning of eighteenth century, scientists such as Carl Linnaeus, Charles Lyell, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Thomas Malthus, formulated theories about the change in species over generations. Carl Linnaeus, a taxonomist and zoologist born in 1707, was the first scientist to group humans, primates, monkeys, and apes together in the same classification. Linnaeus stated in 1747 that, he could not find no “...general difference between men and simian from the principles of Natural History.” Although Linnaeus still believed in a static number of unchanging species put forth by a divine creator, …show more content…

Darwin claimed the forces that shaped the earth--- weathering, exposure, deposition, and lithification-- are echoed in the biological world but in reproduction, competition, and inheritance. Moreover, Lyell also recognized that species have changed. As he claimed in the Principles of Geology, “...it appears that the species have changed.” However, he still believed in an infinite and divine being had some effect in the creation of life. He argued, how could “...so vast a scheme of the perfect harmony of design and unit of purpose… to those existing plant and animals…” be created without the aid of an Eternal Being. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a zoologist in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, noticed the different environments caused the wide variations between aquatic animals. In his book Hydrogeologie, Lamarck outlines the how fish became land dwelling creatures, “…by the different environment provided by the waters, nature led them a little by little to the habit of living in the air, first by the water’s edge and afterward on all the dry parts of the globe. Animals have in course of time been profoundly altered by such novel conditions; which so greatly influenced their habits and organs.” Lamarck was one of the first scientists to notice the variations between the same or similar species in different environments, which Darwin would eventually describe as natural

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