Erasmus Darwin (17311802).
Charles in the parlor ... "Yep, ol' grand dad was always writin' and readin' and doin' all kinds of stuff at that ol' desk over there, and there's this big ol' drawer full of all kinds of stuff ---- hey! hot diggity, lookie here at this ol' book' that grand daddy must 'uv written....!!! Maybe I can sell it! Hmmmmm.... Better yet, mebbe I kin put MY name on it and sell MILLIONS of copies.... He he, yeah, that's the ticket."
(fishtank's screen play for the new production: "Liberalism is a Plagiarism Disorder.")
/sarc
Yeah, that's a takeoff on Savage's book, I admit, but I couldn't resist.
Using wikipedia as evidence? The text that ANYONE can change.
Anyone with even the slightest familiarity with the decades of extremely diligent and detailed work Charles Darwin did to formally flesh out and elucidate the underpinnings of the theory knows the answer to this question.
OTOH, if your only scientific text starts with “In the beginning God...”
I wouldn’t expect much in the way of reasoned argument, nor openness to the fruits of actual observation.
was he the Joe Biden of his time?
Just curious...
What are the “falsifying criteria” for this evolution theory?
LoL
This is certainly not unknown or controversial. Everyone knows Wallace and Erasmus were presenting similar ideas.
This is how it is with just about all science, then and now. Nothing comes out of a vacuum which few exceptions of true genius, such as Mendel’s studies on genetic inheritance.
Darwin’s work shouldn’t be belittled because it was not wholly original with him. It was influential and he put the work in.
Yet, the contemporary phenomenon of his being raised up to iconic, Demi-god status (that people even in this thread seem to hold to) is bizarre and not benign, nor meant to be benign.
Here we have more proof that Darwin’ s theory of evolution was not only false but corrupt.
Thanks for posting the real facts.
Voltaire expressed the fundamentals of Darwinism (natural selection) at least 70 years before Charles Darwin was born. And even then, Voltaire was simply elaborating on the philosophy of Epicurus, who of course pre-dates Darwin by millenia.
I can get the English translated quote and source once I get home, but I believe it comes from Voltaire’s Philisophical Dictionary.
In before Gaia is 6,245 years old.
Einstein built on previous work to come up with the Theory of Relativity, and Newton built on previous work to come up with the Theory of Gravity. We often remember the people who synthesized a bunch of different ideas into a coherent, systematic whole, better than we remember the people with those scattered ideas.
This reminds me of a discussion I was having earlier about whether Steve Jobs was creative or not. The other guy was pointing out that MP3 players existed before the iPod, and music organizers existed before iTunes. Yes, but Jobs’s genius was figuring out how to combine the two into a system. So which made history: Winamp and the Diamond Rio, or iTunes and the iPod?