2023/07/23

Introduction
to the theory of evolution

the “evolution” of the theory of evolution

https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/history_01

Before Darwin
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species – 1859

Before then
 Speculation about transformation of species
 Mainly: “Do species change?”
 [No theory on why species change]

3
 2023/07/23

Before Darwin
Jean-Babtiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829)
 French naturalist
 Philosophie Zoologique (1809)
 “Transformism”
▫ Each species separate origin
▫ Species do change over time
▫ Lineages persist indefinitely
▫ No branching, no extinctions

Darwin Lamarck

Change

Before Darwin
Jean-Babtiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829)…
 Two-part explanation for transformism
1. “Internal force”
Offspring slightly different
Accumulate over many generations
2. Inheritance of acquired characters (characteristics)
As organism (an individual) develops:
Acquire individual characters (accident, disease, muscular exercise etc.)
If individually acquired characters inherited by offspring:
Species transformed
e.g. giraffe’s neck

Before Darwin

6
 2023/07/23

Before Darwin
 Lamarckian inheritance
▫ Not first with idea of inherited characters
▫ Plato – ancient Greece
▫ Still influential work (Philosophie Zoologique, 1809)
▫ In spite of rivalry with Cuvier

Before Darwin
George Cuvier (1769 – 1832)
 French anatomist
 Cuvier’s view:
▫ Each species separate origin
▫ Remain constant in form
▫ Until go extinct

Before Darwin
 Richard Owen (1804 – 1892)
▫ Studied with Cuvier in Paris
▫ Britain’s leading anatomist

 Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875)

▫ Critical discussion in Principles
of Geology (1830 - 1833)

By first half of 19th century

 Most biologists & geologists accept Cuvier’s view

9
 2023/07/23

Darwin’s theory
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)
 Graduate from Cambridge
▫ Degree in Theology
 Voyage on Beagle (1832 – 1837)
▫ Position as naturalist
▫ Travel around world
▫ Observations, collect specimens

10

Darwin’s theory
Year or so after Beagle voyage
 Worked over Galapagos bird collection
 Galapagos finches
▫ Realized should have recorded which
island each specimen came from
▫ Initially supposed single species
▫ Clear each island had distinct species
▫ Easy to imagine all evolved from single
ancestral species
 South American Rheas
▫ Similarly differed between regions

11

Darwin’s theory

12
 2023/07/23

Darwin’s theory
Darwin accepted the idea that species change…
Next step:
 Develop theory to explain why
Considered several ideas
 e.g. Lamarckism
 Rejected all, did not explain adaptation

13

Darwin’s theory
Read Malthus’s Essay on Populations
 Understood struggle for existence
 Realized:
▫ Favourable variations would tend to
be preserved
▫ Unfavourable ones to be destroyed
▫ Result: formation of a new species
 Provided “theory by which to work”
20 years later
 Fitting facts to theory
 Letter from Wallace…

14

Darwin’s theory
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 – 1913)
 British naturalist
 Collect, sell biological specimens
 Amazon, Malay Archipelago
 Observed great species diversity
 Early 1858:
▫ Night of fever
▫ Struggle for survival (Malthus) => Survival of fittest
▫ Letter to Darwin

 They hit upon same central mechanism of evolution

(natural selection)

15
 2023/07/23

Darwin’s theory
Darwin’s response
 1858: Present Darwin and Wallace’s work
simultaneously to Linnaean Society, London
(in absence of Wallace)
Darwin publishes
 On the Origin of Species (1859)

16

Darwin’s Reception, Impact

Reaction to theories differed
 evolution vs natural selection
Evolution
 Controversial, positive and negative responses
▫ Was seen to contradict Genesis
▫ Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 – 1895)
English biologist - Defender of Darwin
Few shared Darwin’s (exact) idea of evolution
 Darwin:
Not inherently progressive (simple to complex)
▫ Determined by local conditions (environment)
▫ No inherent tendency to rise to higher form
▫ If progressive, just how turned out
 vs. others:
▫ One-dimensional and progressive

17

Darwin’s Reception, Impact

Natural selection
 Rejected
▫ lacked satisfactory theory of heredity
▫ Evolution by chance
Misunderstood (natural selection is not random)
▫ Gaps between forms in nature
initial/transitional forms not advantageous
e.g. bird wing
(useless stubs vs useful fully developed wings)

18
 2023/07/23

Darwin’s Reception, Impact

Alternative theories (vs. natural selection)
 Theories of directed variation
▫ Offspring consistently different in certain direction
internal force /
▫ Most popular: Lamarckian inheritance
Inheritance of
acquired characters
August Weismann (1833 – 1914)
 Acquired characters during life (somatic cells) not inherited
 Only source of inheritance is germ cells
 Directly opposed to Lamarckian inheritance

Turn of century (late 1800’s)

 Majority view:
Natural selection needed to be supplemented by another
process

19

Darwin’s Reception, Impact

Mendel’s theory of heredity
 Law of inheritance (1866)
 Rediscovered around 1900
 Early Mendelians opposed natural selection
(± 1900 – 1920)
 Mainly researched inheritance of large
genetic differences between parents and offspring…
Macromutations
 Evolution proceeds in big jumps
 Mendelism not universally accepted…

20

Darwin’s Reception, Impact

Biometricians (early 1900s)
 Karl Pearson
 Studied small differences between individuals
 Evolution as a steady (continuous) shift of whole population
(vs. big evolutionary jumps -> macromutations)

21
 2023/07/23

Darwin’s Reception, Impact

Mendelians Biometricians

22

Modern Synthesis
Main problem to reconcile
 Mendelian theory of genetics
 Biometricians’ description of continuous variation in real
populations
Several authors / many stages: NB 1918 paper
 R. A. Fisher (1890 – 1962)
 All results known to biometricians could be derived from Mendelian principles

23

Modern Synthesis
Next step to show natural selection could operate
with Mendelian genetics
 Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, Sewell Wright
 Independently did most theoretical work
Synthesis of
 Darwin’s theory of natural selection
 Mendel’s theory of heredity
R. A. Fisher J.B.S. Haldane Sewell Wright
Called
 Neo-Darwinism, modern synthesis

24
 2023/07/23

Recap:
• Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection explains evolutionary
change and adaptation.
• Darwin lacked a theory of heredity.
• Fisher, Haldane and Wright demonstrated that Mendelian heredity and
natural selection are compatible.
• This synthesis is known as neo-Darwinism.

25

Recap:
• During the 1930s and 1940s neo-Darwinism became widely accepted and
spread through all areas of biology.
• It unifies genetics, systematics, classic comparative morphology and
embryology = the modern synthesis

26

The Theory of Evolution

27
 2023/07/23

Definition of Evolution
Evolution = change
 Darwin: “Descent with modification”
 Harrison (2001): “Change over time via descent with
modification”
DNA, morphology, behaviour
Descent
Incremental changes
 From one generation to the next, in a population
 Over time, differences (modifications) add up
 => distinctions between populations….and species…
 => Descendants (related)
Population lineage
 An ancestor-descendent series of (related) generations
within populations
Thus:
 Evolution is change between generations within a
population lineage

28

Definition of Evolution
What biological evolution is NOT:
 Developmental change (any) within the life
of an organism
 Change in the composition of an ecosystem

29

Definition of Evolution
Properties of evolution
 No predictable course
▫ Details depend on:
Environment
Genetic variation
 Proceeds in branching pattern
▫ Splitting of lineages

30
 2023/07/23

Definition of Evolution
Biological evolution is descent with modification
 small-scale evolution (changes in gene frequency in
a population from one generation to the next)
 large-scale evolution (the descent of different
species from a common ancestor over many
generations).
General Theory of Evolution
 General Theory of Evolution (GTE)
“…the theory that all the living forms in the world
have arisen from a single source which itself came
from an inorganic form...”
Kerkut, G.A., Implications of Evolution, Pergamon, Oxford,
UK, p. 157, 1960.

31

Adaptation
Theory of evolution must explain adaptations…
Enable survival that enables reproduction

=> Natural selection

 Only those individuals in a population adapted to
current environmental conditions will survive to
reproduce and pass those (favoured) traits to their
offspring
 Acts on existing genetic variation in the gene pool –
does not introduce new genetic information
 New information via mutations

32