1 gen 1859 anni - Charles Darwin's On the Origin of SPecies

Descrizione:

Evolution — the idea that species are not fixed, but ever changing — was not a simple idea on which all scientists agreed. In his immensely influential 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, British naturalist Charles Darwin argued that all creatures struggle to survive. He argued that when individual members of a species are born with random genetic mutations that better suit them for their environment — for example, camouflage coloring for a moth — these characteristics, since they are genetically transmissible, become dominant in future generations. Many scientists rejected this theory of natural selection. They followed a line of thinking laid out by French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who argued, unlike Darwin, that individual animals or plants could acquire transmittable traits within a single lifetime. A rhinoceros that fought fiercely, in Lamarck’s view, could build up a stronger horn; its offspring would then be born with that trait.

Darwin himself disapproved of the word evolution (which does not appear in his book) because it implied upward progress. In his view, natural selection could not be assigned a human moral value: environments and species changed through random mutation.

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