Prior to the discoveries and scientific advances which characterized the sociocultural and ideological climate of the sixteenth century, European worldviews were predominated by the influence of the notion that “all aspects of nature, including all forms of life and their relationships to one another, never changed” (Jurmain, 2018: 27). This concept of the “fixity of species” was promulgated and defended by “an extremely powerful religious system in which the teachings of Christianity were held to the only ‘truth’” so that it was “generally accepted that all life on earth had been created by God exactly as it existed in the present” (Jurmain, 2018: 27).
Several centuries later, in the mid-nineteenth century, both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently developed the theory of evolution according to the processes of natural selection. However, the conceptualization of the theory of natural selection, “the single most important force of evolution,” having been conceived of by two British men at relatively the same time, was concomitant rather than coincidental (Jurmain, 2018: 27).
The scientific groundwork which heralded the development of the theory of evolution by natural selection “had already been laid in Britain and France, and many scientists were prepared to accept explanations of biological change that would have been unacceptable even 25 years before” (Jurmain, 2018, 27). Just as scientific “knowledge is usually gained through a series of small steps … and builds on previously developed theories,” so too were Wallace and Darwin able to conceive of the theory of evolution by natural selection based on the contributions of the biological scientists who preceded them—scientists including John Ray, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, and Jean-Baptist Lamarck (Jurmain, 2018: 27).
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John Ray, a British minister educated at the University of Cambridge in the seventeenth century, “established the basis for our modern understanding of species” through his recognition of the differentiation of groups of plants and animals based on “their ability to mate with one another and produce fertile offspring” (Godfrey, 2018: “Chapter 2: The Development of Evolutionary Theory”)(Jurmain, 2018: 29). He named these groups, which were separated according to reproductive isolation, as “species.”
This “biological criterion of reproduction” was, and is still, utilized in the definition and categorization of species, much as it would later be used to define a key requirement of natural selection which states that “[n]atural selection can act only on traits that affect reproduction” (Jurmain, 2018: 29)(Godfrey, 2018: “Chapter 2: The Development of Evolutionary Theory”). Ray’s development of the classification of species, and his subsequent conceptualization of genus, which groups together species that “frequently share similarities with other species,” was elaborated upon by Carolus Linnaeus, the “Father of Modern Taxonomy,” in the eighteenth century (Jurmain, 2018: 29).
Also during the eighteenth century, French naturalist Georges-Louis Comte Leclerc de Buffon recognized that “alterations of the external environment, including the climate, were agents of change in species” (Jurmain, 2018: 30). By observing that unique plants and animals were contained within variant environments, de Buffon proposed the existence of a “dynamic relationship between the external environment and living forms,” a notion which serves as the conceptual basis for the theory of natural selection (Jurmain, 2018: 30).
In his 36-volume Histoire Naturelle, de Buffon, named “the father of evolutionism” by Ernst Mayr, also “stressed that animals come from a ‘center of origin,’” although he never “discussed the diversification of life over time” (Jurmain, 2018: 30).The observations of de Buffon were supplemented by the theory of the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics, posited by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries (Godfrey, 2018: “Chapter 2: The Development of Evolutionary Theory”).
Much like de Buffon, Lamarck suggested a “dynamic relationship between species and the environment,” but, unlike his predecessor, Lamarck theorized that “if the external environment changed, an animal’s activity patterns would also change to accommodate the new circumstances” (Jurmain, 2018: 30). Lamarck’s theory of the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics suggests “that traits acquired by actions taken during an organism’s lifetime could be passed on to offspring” (Godfrey, 2018: “Chapter 2: The Development of Evolutionary Theory”).
Although this theory is incorrect, as it is now known that the inheritance of traits is directly influenced by genetic processes, Lamarck’s attempts to explain the evolutionary process, rather than to merely acknowledge its potential existence, were essential to furthering the development of what would become the theory of evolution by natural selection (Jurmain, 2018: 30).John Ray, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck are just three of the many early scientific contributors who were essential to forming the foundation of what would become the theories of evolution and natural selection.
Other such predecessors include Carolus Linnaeus, the “Father of Modern Taxonomy”; Erasmus Darwin, who proposed the idea of a common ancestor; Georges Cuvier and his concept of Catastrophism; Charles Lyell, the “Father of Modern Geology”; and Mary Anning, the “’Fossilist’ whose many important finds contributed to important changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth” (Godfrey, 2018: “Chapter 2: The Development of Evolutionary Theory”). So, while we credit Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace with the ultimate conceptualization of the theory of evolution by natural selection, such advancements were ultimately facilitated by the previous efforts of scientists and naturalists beginning in the sixteenth century.
