Comparing Lamarckism, Darwinism, And Synthetic Theory

There have been many theories of evolution and how it is brought about and what it is exactly. Charles Darwin a scientist who came up with his theory of evolution and how it works. Darwin felt as though evolution to him was that it occurred through natural selection. Natural selection is the process of only traits that will survive are passed to the next generation. Species selection operates on variation provided by the largely random process of speciation and favors species that speciate at high rates or survive for long periods and therefore tend to leave many daughter species (Stanley, 1975 ). So Darwin believed that the next generations of animals or different species were created by taking only the traits of species

In the first chapter, Coyne discusses the basic concept outline of evolution, and brings clarity to the common misconceptions thought and said about how the science works, and the large misuse of the word theory. The first chapter of this book also defines very carefully each of the main hypothesis of evolutionary theory. Which stands in dissimilarity to many other treatments of evolution, which all have a propensity to confuse some readers by integrating different meanings of the word. Coyne also divides Darwinism into six components. They are: evolution which means change over time, gradualism which is a policy of slower change rather than sudden change or a revolution, speciation which is the evolutionary process where a new biological species

time, his thinking has been influential. What is considered to be the great importance of his

Evolution has been a very debatable topic since the theory of evolution first evolved. By definition, evolution is “the process by which different kinds of living organism are believed to have developed from earlier forms during the history of the earth”, but there are many different types of “evolution” such as coevolution, divergent, parallel and convergent – all with different theories. Jean Baptiste Lamarck was a French naturalist who invented the theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics (aka. “soft inheritance”). This evolutionary theory described how the natural environment affected the way an animal used their body parts. The features used regularly or for survival are passed onto the creatures offspring, and the parts that weren’t used, weren’t. On the other hand, another English naturalist Charles Darwin established a theory of “natural selection”. A process in which creatures that survived in their environment would pass their genes through the generations, compared to the weaker species with a lower survival rate, who reproduce less offspring or none.

Darwinism is a philosophy that was taken off of the theory of Darwinism in two aspects

Darwin and Lamarck also agreed that life evolved from less, simpler organisms to many, more complex organisms. The differences are that Lamarck believed in theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, meaning if an organism changes during life in order to adapt to its environment, those changes are passed on to its offspring. He said that change is made by what the organisms want or need. Lamarck also believed that evolution happens according to a predetermined plan and that the results have already been decided. Whereas Darwin’s theory was that diverse groups of animals evolve from one or a few common ancestors; the mechanism by which this takes place is natural selection. Natural selection is when random evolutionary changes are selected for by nature in a consistent, orderly and non-random way. Darwin believed that organisms have changed over time, and the ones living today are different from those that lived in the past. Darwin’s theory has been supported by a lot of evidence including the fact that over time, populations split into different species which are related because they are descended from a common ancestor. While Lamarck’s theory has been disproven; this has been done in two ways, by experiment and by the study of

Evolution, an idea acknowledged by Jean Lamarck, a scientist who first had an idea about evolution. If Lamarck did not acknowledged his ideas about evolution, other scientist such as Thomas Malthus, Charles Lyell, and

Lamarck’s theory states that all organisms start life out the same with no variations in their characteristics. Depending on the needs or wants of an organism, changes in the structure or habit of the organism can occur. This theory also states that these characteristics are passed or inherited by the next generation. Lamarck also believed that body parts that were not used would disappear and people would no longer have these parts. (“Evolution”, 2016)

Darwinism is the theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Darwin’s theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is the process of which organisms that are better adapted to their environment tend to survive longer and pass down certain traits to the next generation. There are many different ideas as to how evolution started. The theory of evolution states that it happened spontaneously due to perfect conditions on the Earth millions of years ago. Others believe that it happened through the Cambrian explosion.

This stated that evolutionary changes within organisms were caused by environmental factors, and would then modify their behavior. According to Lamarck, the changes in traits could be hereditarily passed from one generation to the next, creating a constant change over time for the species. Stating the prospect of natural selection, Lamarck’s theories paralleled Darwin’s; only Lamarck came up with his theories way before Darwin ("Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)”).

Lamarck was a french biologist that claimed that animals changed according to natural laws. He explained that animals could pass traits to their offspring, using inheritance. His idea was a giraffe's neck grew longer because it tried to reach higher up. This idea failed because it could not harmonize with heredity, Mendel’s

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1755-1829) is one of the best-known early evolutionists, holding a belief that evolution was a continuous development and strived toward greater complexity and perfection. Through which, his theory of evolution was that living organisms evolved in a unceasingly up ward direction, from dead matter, through simple to more complex forms and towards human “perfection” (Nesci.edu, 2015). From his theories of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics; where organisms adapt to their environments and those changes were passed onto their off springs (Corbis, 2001), to his theories of Use and Disuse, where organisms that are not used progressively disappear (Evolution.berkeley.edu, 2015). Lamarck was the first biologist to publish

Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace's concept of natural selection and descent with modification helped shape the theory of evolution which holds as much weight as the theory of relativity per se. Evolutionary biology is the science devoted to understanding how populations change through time in response to modifications of their environment and how new species come into being by studying adaptation and diversity (Freeman and Herron 2004). Evolutionary biology has proved that all organisms have evolved from a common ancestor over the last 3.5 billion years. There is a common misconception that evolution is only a theoretical or abstract science with little or no relevance to the real world (Halliburton, 2004). This common misperception

Many knowledge claims in human and natural science are based on theories. Jean Lamarck proposed the theory of evolution in 1801. The theory of evolution proposed by Lamarck was based on the idea that organisms had to change their behavior to survive. For instance, if a giraffe stretched it neck for a long period of time to reach the leaves as the top of the tree, then a “nervous fluid” would flow in the neck and make it longer. Thus, its