More grade school journalism. They could have started with Anaximander in the 6th century BC, or with Lamarck in the modern era.
More grade school journalism. They could have started with Anaximander in the 6th century BC, or with Lamarck in the modern era.
While there are certainly numerous and serious deficiencies with this article, I would hardly include that. There are huge differences between these ancient theorist, and Lamarck, versus Darwin. For instance none of these preceding theories incorporated one of the central ideas of modern evolutionary theory, namely common descent. Lamarck's theory, for instance, included spontaneous generation, with primordial forms then progressively ascending a kind of "Great Escalator of Being". The "escalator" itself was pretty much fixed in form. The change occurred in species moving up and along it. On this scheme modern horseshoe crabs, for instance, might not even be related (by a reproductive chain that is) to ancient ones. Since the horseshoe crab is just a "stage," ancient and modern instances would probably trace back to different instances of ancestral spontaneous generation.