I'd hate to get a question like that worth 8 marks! Evolution topic is the worst part about biology coz you needa know all these guys names who made up a bunch of crap and the effects it had on society. It's more history than biology.
Woah thanks! I'm printing that xDTim035 said:There were three main philosophies current during the 18th and 19th century that delayed the widespread acceptance of evolution. These were nature theology, literal creationism essentialism.
Natural theology had its goal in demonstrating God’s power through a study of the biological world. Amazing adaptations and the supposed hierarchy of living things were seen as proof of God’s handiwork and role in creation.
Essentialism held that everything had an essence or typical form that was unchanging and fixed since the time of creation.
Creationists took as literally true the biblical stories of creation and that the earth of was only a few 1000 years old.
In France, the French revolution and Napoleonic forms had created an environment where Lamarck was able to propose that living things had evolved but in conservative England such talk was nonsense. The fact that Lamarck was French was enough to make his ideas unwelcome in England. If nature were self evolving, if the clergy could not point to miraculously created species as a sign of God’s power, the Churches legitimacy would be undermined. It was believed civilized man would return to savagery if people accepted that society and nature had evolved unaided.
Starting in the 18th century, new discoveries began to change old beliefs, in astronomy the earth was shown to be one of several planets that revolved around the sun and that man was not the centre of the Universe. There was increasing urge to find natural explanations for events.
In Edinburgh where Darwin was a student, many prominent people were progressive. Darwin was a close friend of Robert Grant and supported an evolutionary explanation of the diversity of organisms. Radical thinkers lectured at the university and in medical and geological classes students were being taught about progression and change. Through out his life Darwin associated with free thinkers and dissenters. Many of Darwin’s friends and family were radical dissenters who urged for social and religious reform. But radicals and materialists were being persecuted- William Lawrence had been forced to resign his post at the college of surgeons and recent his book on evolution “Lectures on Man” was ruled blasphemous. Which destroyed its copyright and was pirated by the gutter press who published it in cheap forms with flyers denouncing the Church authorities.
In January 1844, the idea of evolution of species was associated with riot and revolution. Street Atheists touted evolution and vowed to mash the Anglican state. Darwin’s clerical friends stood to lose their livelihoods, he was appalled at the idea that the theories he was secretly working on could lead him to being accused of betraying his privileged class. This was one of the reasons that Darwin was so reticent to publish his ideas.