THE THEORY OF EVOLUTIONAL
AM
Y
NEED TO KNOW
Important terms
surrounding the
theory of evolutionLAMARCKISM
OR LAMARCKIAN
EVOLUTION
Also known as soft inheritance,
it ’s the idea that an organism
can pass on characteristics
acquired during its lifetime to
its offspring. It is named after
the French biologist
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.NATURAL SELECTION
The key mechanism of
evolution. This is the process by
which biological traits become
more or less common in a
population a s a result of the
effects of inherited traits on
the reproductive success of
organisms. Sometimes called
‘ the sur viv al of the f ittes t ’,
it was co-discovered by
Wallace and Darwin.TRANSMUTATION
An early term employed to
describe evolution. It was used
alongside others, such as the
development theory or
transformism. British scientists
like Charles Lyell sometimes
used it to discredit the theory
by implying a connection
with alchemy or magic –
transmutation being a key term
in alchemical theory.book he’d been waiting for all his life:
a coherent account of the history of the
Earth. But Wallace was also frustrated
at the lack of proof Vest iges provided.
When he set off with his friend
Edward Bates to collect natural history
specimens in Brazil, he determined to
bring back the evidence.
Ten years later, an exhausted
Wallace, hallucinating his way
through a malaria attack on an island
in the Malay Archipelago, suddenly
saw how evolution might work: “It
occurred to me to ask the question,
Why do some die and some live?” he
wrote. “And the answer was clear, that
on the whole the best fitted survive...”
Back in Britain, Charles Darwin
already knew this. He’d begun to put
his theory of natural selection together
in his notebooks of the 1830s and, by
1844, had developed these ideas into
an unpublished essay. But that essay
was still locked away in a drawer.
Busy working on the Beagle collection,
distracted by an eight-year project on
barnacles, and alarmed at the amount
of vitriol Vest iges had drawn from the
establishment, he’d determined to
bide his time.When Wallace wrote to him in
1858 and sent him his essay on natural
selection, Darwin was devastated. He
brought in his friends to adjudicate:
he needed to know the gentlemanly
way to behave. The Linnaean Society
gathered and made their judgement:
Darwin had drafted the idea 10 years
before Wallace. Wallace gracefully
conceded. He explained that he’d
never claimed priority and instead
was honoured to be associated with
the idea and with the distinguished
Charles Darwin.
Historians still debate the ethics of
that decision, but as a consequence
Wallace returned to his beloved
fieldwork while Darwin began the
long and difficult campaign to defend
the theory. Darwin, with his collection
of detailed evidence, his persuasive
rhetorical skills, reputation, status and
wide circle of supporters, was without
doubt the better man for that task.Napoleon’s specimen collection at the Museum of Natural History in Paris sparked a surge of interest in
theories of how life on Earth was able to become so diverseby P R O F R E B E C C A S T O T T
(@RebeccaStott64) Prof Stott is the author of
Darwin’s Ghosts: in search of the first evolutionists.