11.28.08
Devolution of a good idea
Charles Darwin’s imagination, as well as his powers of observation and deduction, put him in a class of his own, writes Miriam Cosic
Actually Lamarck, the true founder of evolution, had a better idea than Darwin, with evolution on two levels. (not to be confused with his theory of adaptation)
ADVANCES in thinking rarely happen by those aha! leaps beloved of popular culture. Great scientists build on the work of predecessors, tinkering and testing, sometimes advancing, sometimes consolidating the body of knowledge.
By the time Charles Darwin proclaimed human kinship with apes, the product of amoral natural selection rather than an aha! moment of God’s, the ground had been well prepared. Since the Renaissance, and even more so since the Enlightenment, philosophers had been discovering — and rediscovering from early thinkers eclipsed by Christianity — human-scaled explanations for many of the mysteries of the world.
Theories of evolution had been around for some time. In the 18th century Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had traced the similarities between not only humans and animals but animals and plants, and Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had considered evolution in his medical treatise Zoonomia. Even Aristotle, one of the foremost among the clear-thinking Greeks of the distant classical era, had noted the similarities between skeletons of apes and humans.