2. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-malthus-predicted-1798-food-shortages/
After researching some of these guys I came to the conclusion that Thomas Malthus was probably the most influential person to his theory of natural selection. Malthus was different from most of the others who help support his ideas though, and that was that he was not a scientist, but rather an economist. So he was more knowledgeable in human population and the demographic in which we lived. His idea that there was more people than there was food. If this trend continues eventually there would be people dying of starvation. Darwin took this and applied it to all species, and which is how we also know the phrase "survival of the fittest." Thats how Thomas Malthus was able to influence Charles Darwin's theory.
3. Resources are limited. Our planet has a limit of much it can hold and produce. There will not be enough resources available for all organisms to reproduce as many offspring as they can.
- I think this definitely correlates with what Malthus was saying. His focus was on human population and he saw the trend of there not being enough resources for certain populations.
Who gets better access to these limited resources? Is it random? Or are some organism better “fit” to the environment, enabling them to compete more successfully for resources and avoid predation better than others? Darwin hypothesized that organisms with traits that were better adapted to their environment would have greater reproductive success because those traits allowed them to be more competitive for the things they needed to reproduce.
- In this world today the more resources you have the better you are living. People who usually lack things like money,work, or land live in the overpopulated areas. People who live near the beach have better resources, and people who live in the open suburban areas can grow some of their resources or produce other products. Someone who have lived in these areas for all the life have passed it on to generation and generation.
4. Charles Darwin will always be considered the best when it comes to evolution. However, I don't think he could have had the success that he did without some of these guys here, especially Thomas Malthus. Malthus gave him a foundation or an angle to work with that not even other scientists could have given him. Malthus being an economist helped himself realize what he could offer to science.
5. Well the church didn't like his point of view from his book "The origin of species." It had gone against everything that the bible had said and it toggled with their social and religious views as well. With the non-support of the church Darwin may have limited himself in future ideas because of this.
Actually, Malthus observed that natural, non-human populations seemed to avoid problems of famine and disease because they allowed natural processes to limit their populations sizes. Humans, on the other hand, seemed impervious to these natural limits and tended towards overpopulation. This left only processes such as famine and disease to cut back human populations sizes. But Darwin was struck by the idea of natural limited process and recognized this as competition for those limited resources. This was the platform from which he based his work.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your first choice of bullet point but the second one isn't from Malthus, at least not directly. This was the connection Darwin made using Malthus' work. There are two others that apply directly to Malthus as well, however, namely the first two addressing the issue of exponential population growth.
I rarely like to give too much credit to any one scientist for his influence and importance over the success of another, but I am willing to make an exception in Malthus' case (Lyell is another I would consider an exception). Malthus seems to have provided the key Darwin needed to put together all the pieces of his research puzzle. Darwin even seems to suggest this in his notes:
"... it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work".
Charles Darwin, from his autobiography. (1876) http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/malthus.html
Actually, the church didn't know about his work until he published, so they wouldn't have been pushing back yet. But Darwin delayed for more than 20 years before publishing. Why? What were his concerns? And what role might the church have played in his decision to delay?