Download The influences of Buffon and Lyell on Darwin`s theory of evolution

Anthr 1 ­ Sample Essay ­ Word Count ~716 "Identify two different precursors who influenced Darwin's formulation of natural selection." The influences of Buffon and Lyell on Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection is indebted to two key figures of the scientific revolution ­ French naturalist, Comte de Buffon and English geologist Charles Lyell. Buffon's views of change among living organisms and Lyell's promotion of uniformitarianism became indispensable components in Darwin's theory of natural selection which explained how evolutionary change occurs over extended periods of time. Comte de Buffon is cited as one of the first naturalists to recognize the dynamic nature between the environment and living organisms. Buffon noted that different geographic regions around the world featured plants and animals unique to those specific regions (Jurmain et al., 2013:31). He further recognized that changes in the external environment correlated with changes in the living things within that environmental context. Though Buffon never explicitly stated what this dynamic relationship produced distinct populations over long periods of time, the inference that environment changes influenced changes in species contributed to the disconfirmation of the reigning paradigm promoting the fixity of species. English geologist Charles Lyell was not the first to propose the concept of uniformitarianism ­ the idea that the geological forces active today operated roughly the same in the past ­ an insight attributed to James Hutton in the 1700s. However Lyell was the first to legitimize the concept as a scientific explanation with the publication of ​
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Principles of Geology in the early 1830s. In this work Lyell demonstrated that forces such as wind and water erosion, local flooding, frost, floral decomposition, volcanism, earthquakes, and glaciation active over extended periods of time were responsible for shaping Earth's geologic landscape. That is, both sudden and catastrophic processes like earthquakes and local flooding or slow­acting forces like Anthr 1 ­ Sample Essay ­ Word Count ~716 "Identify two different precursors who influenced Darwin's formulation of natural selection." glaciation and erosion produced momentous change and spoke of an Earth with a deep past well beyond 6,000 years. Both Buffon and Lyell developed key insights about the natural world which influenced Darwin's evolutionary theory via natural selection. In a nutshell, the process of natural selection argues that individuals in a population vary in inheritable traits. Individuals with favorable traits, traits making an individual more equipped to handle environmental stressors, were more likely to survive and reproduce than those members lacking those traits. Over many generations, favorable traits became more frequent in a population to such an extent that later generations became distinct from an ancestral generation, i.e., a new species emerged. Darwin synthesized Buffon's view that the environment influenced changes in living organisms into a more concrete hypothesis arguing that it was the changes in environmental context which placed selective pressure on a population of individuals with varying traits. Darwin added to Buffon's insights the idea that these selective pressures guided evolutionary change, contending that individuals with traits that secured reproductive success conferred a higher fitness level compared to those lacking such favorable traits. Darwin took Lyell's idea of uniformitarianism and incorporated the concept of evolutionary change, which he argued occurred gradually, over extended intervals of time. Lyell also provided the groundwork for another process which resulted in speciation via natural selection ­ specifically, geographic isolation where a single population becomes geographically isolated and making them both reproductively isolated and in different environmental contexts. The difference in environment leads to a difference in selective pressures selecting for traits more likely to confer in Anthr 1 ­ Sample Essay ­ Word Count ~716 "Identify two different precursors who influenced Darwin's formulation of natural selection." reproductive success. Again, over long time intervals, derived generations (significantly later) become distinct from ancestral generations which would constitute origin of a new species. Among many others, the scientific investigations of Buffon and Lyell profoundly influenced Charles Darwin and became key components of his explanation of evolutionary change. Buffon's recognition of the dynamic relationship between the environment and the variation of organisms within said environment is clearing put to work in the importance of selective pressures on guiding the frequency of traits in a population. Lyell's legitimization of uniformitarianism allowed for the inference that past forces operated much like current forces ­ even slow­paced ones which resulted in momentous changes in the geologic landscape. As a result, Darwin was more secure in positing an evolutionary process that argued that speciation occurred over extended intervals of time. The insights of Buffon and Lyell are clearly reflected in the theory Darwin first published in 1859 and undergird the modern concept of evolutionary theory today.