Anthro 101
Historical influences blog post.
- Probably the most influential person on Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection was Thomas Malthus. He was not a scientist but an economist who wrote several essays on how the increasing population would grow faster than the amount of food production could support resulting in many fatalities due to starvation. Darwin took this and applied it to all species of animals. Malthus’ ideas were the same as “survival of the fittest” Darwin observed that it applied to humans and well as animals. Darwin gave a Malthus’ work a lot of praise for helping him develop his own ideas about evolution.
- http://evolution.about.com/od/scientists/p/Thomas-Malthus.htm. Thomas Malthus biggest contribution to the scientific community was his most prominent piece of work the essay titled ‘The Principles of Population’ written in 1798. Poverty interested him as all periods throughout history, suffering has been prevalent. He theorized that as populations increase in size there would be insufficient food to facilitate for that many people. He suggested that as a result there would be starvation and famine.
- There are several points that were influenced by Thomas Malthus; resources are limited. Our planet a limit of how much we can hold and produce. There will not be enough resources available for all organisms to reproduce as many offspring they can. This point was hugely influenced by Malthus because it was his essay that first theorized that as the population gets bigger the demand for food is higher, however there will be not enough food to provide for the population leading to starvation and deaths. Organisms with better access to resources will be more successful in their reproductive efforts. This can be related to humans and how the lower classes were dying due to the lack of resources that were presented to them. Malthus solution was to limit the number of offspring the lower classes were able to produce, he blamed the poor for continuing to reproduce even though they don’t have the resources to do so. This is essentially the same as “survival of the fittest” those who cannot successfully reproduce as a result of their access to resources die and do not prosper.
- Darwin essentially read and was inspired by Malthus’ essay ‘The Principles of Population’. He then took his theory and applied it to species of animals. Malthus helped inspire Darwin to refine his natural selection theory by giving a reason to why there is competition between members of the same species. You could argue that without the influence of Thomas Malthus, Darwin would never have been able to refine his theory of ‘Natural Selection’. Because he was able to look at Malthus’s work, relate to it and use it to further his own scientific theories.
- The attitude of the Church affected Darwin and the publication of his book because he knew how much it would anger them and how much they would be opposed to it. The church obviously didn’t take too kindly to ideas being published that denounced the word of God which Darwin’s theory directly opposes. However Alfred Wallace urged him to push on with the book’s publication regardless of the result.
In general, good description of Malthus' work, but there is a distinction that needs to be made in order to understand why Darwin was drawn to this work and used it to form his own theory.
ReplyDeleteMalthus observed that, in natural populations, even though there was the potential of exponential growth rates that would cause the population to far out-grow its available resources (that only grow at an arithmetic rate), natural populations didn't appear to overpopulate. There was some type of natural limiting factor that kept them in check. Malthus contrasted that observation with human populations, which always seemed to be over-populating and out-growing their available resources. This concerned Malthus, who argued that humans need to learn to control their reproduction (he was a huge proponent of contraception) or else we would be faced with famine, disease and other disasters which would control our population numbers for us. But it was the initial observation about resources appearing to provide some type of limiting factor to natural populations, preventing overpopulation, that caught Darwin's attention.
I agree with your selection of the bullet point addressing limited resources. This is directly tied to Malthus' work. However, Malthus wasn't the least bit interested in figuring out why some individuals had better reproductive success than others. He was mostly concerned with over-reproduction in general and how to stop it.
Another point that can be traced directly to Malthus is the first one, the mathematical concept of the potential for all populations to grow exponentially. This was the starting point for Malthus' argument and served as a basis for Darwin's as well, leading to the concept of competition for limited resources.
I agree with your conclusions in the next section. I rarely like to assign too much credit to any one scientist for the work of another, but in the case of Malthus (and Lyell is another), I am willing to consider it, given how central this concept of competition for available resources is to Darwin's mechanism. Even Darwin seems to indicate just how crucial Malthus' work was in his own writings:
" ...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
I agree with your final section but you need to finish the story! What was the result of the church's attitude on Darwin's decision to publish? The answer: Darwin delayed publishing for more than 20 years. The question is, why? And how did the influence of the church play a role in this delay? What were Darwin's concerns? And was he only worried about himself or was he also worried about how his family might be impacted by publishing?
I thought you did a really good job, I also chose Malthus but I seemingly put way less detail into why he was important. All your reasoning is sound and well-supported, I had no idea that Malthus suggested a limit on poor people reproducing and that just seems really screwed up to me. Good post though.
ReplyDeleteSamuel,
ReplyDeleteFirst off great post. You made it clear on what was expected. Very nformative and detailed. I thought you did a really good job when you comapred it to “survival of the fittest” those who cannot successfully reproduce as a result of their access to resources die and do not prosper." I was a great comaparison. Great Work!