The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary

This quantity is a finished reference paintings at the existence, labors, and impression of the good evolutionist Charles Darwin. With greater than sixty essays written through a global staff representing the prime students within the box, this is often the definitive paintings on Darwin. It covers the heritage to Darwin's discovery of the idea of evolution via normal choice, the paintings he produced and his contemporaries' reactions to it, and evaluates his impression on technology within the a hundred and fifty years because the book of starting place of Species. It additionally explores the consequences of Darwin's discoveries in faith, politics, gender, literature, tradition, philosophy, and drugs, significantly comparing Darwin's legacy. absolutely illustrated and obviously written, it truly is compatible for students and scholars in addition to the final reader. The wealth of data it offers in regards to the background of evolutionary suggestion makes it a very important source for figuring out the controversies that encompass evolution this day.

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This supposition gains further strength when one finds that Darwin divided sexual selection into two kinds: selection between males through conflicts for females (“male combat”) and selection by females for more desirable males (“female choice”) – thus the magnificent antlers of the stag and the gorgeous feathers of the peacock, respectively. These correspond – and Darwin points out the correspondence – to breeders selecting for fighting spirits in their dogs and cocks and breeders selecting for prettier feathers on their budgerigars and like pets.

In this wise, Darwin certainly looked toward the secular science of today rather than backward to the god-impregnated inquiries that were, for instance, the staple of his Cambridge mentors and teachers. And finally, before moving on from looking at the Origin directly, mention must be made of the fact that the book itself was an exercise in evolution (Essay 18: “ The Evolution of the Origin (1859–1872)”). It went through six editions and involved a huge amount of rewriting and often expansion. It used to be that it was always the sixth and final edition that was reprinted.

It was usually if not always mixed up with analogies with individual development and thus led to a kind of progressivist reading of life’s history, the kind that made Darwin so uncomfortable when he separated himself from views about inevitable, upward change. ” To this day, there are debates about just how much of a Darwinian we should consider Haeckel. Undoubtedly he was an enthusiast for the Origin, and nigh hero worshiped Darwin himself. But his writings show strong evidence of his own intellectual heritage, with a taste for tracing trees – that he himself illustrated memorably – rather than working on the ways in which a mechanism like natural selection could produce organisms and their adaptations.

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