Darwin Essay

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Before Darwin what was believed?
It was believed that each biological species was fixed for eternity, changelessly perfect in obedience to fixed natural laws. Plato's forms, Aristotle's essences and Christian theology. Therefore, qualitative change was something unusual to nature
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What are the two components of evolution?
An engine of change, a mechanism that creates offspring that are in some way different from their parents and the second, is a means of preserving changes
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Therefore?
If one's innovation cannot be passed on to its offspring, it will be lost and evolution will not take place
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By Darwin's time, what was evolution?
A concept up for discussion, rejected only by firm religionists and a few biological establishment who still accepted to fixity of the species
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What had Herbert spencer already done?
Coined the phrase 'Survival of the fittest' n 1852, a few years before Darwin
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What happened after Darwin's trip on the HMS beagle?
Darwin became a recluse and the struggle for natural selection was carried on by others, such as Huxley
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Wallace
He had also discovered natural selection around the same time as Darwin, He had been to South America and saw the variation in animals. He then sent his paper to Darwin.
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What is paragraph 2?
The ideas of Darwin
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What was Darwin's achievement?
Make evolution into a theory consistent with the rest of science providing a nonteleological mechanism
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What would Lamarck's notion replace?
Organisms and species striving to be perfect and improve themselves
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What was the ideas of Darwin?
While similar in overall shape, each species has a somewhat different beak. Moreover, each type of beak is suited to each species’ means of foraging.
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Therefore, what did Darwin notice?
each species had descended from a common ancestor, and each had changed over time to exploit a particular way of life
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Therefore, what is Darwinian main principle of adaptation?
Evolution's result is to improve the fit between the species and its environment
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What was one pamphlet read as?
The art of improving the breeds of domestic animals: John Sebright, indicated that nature, too, selected some traits and rejected others, just as breeders did.
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Ruse, 1975
• “A severe Winter, or a scarcity of food, by destroying the weak and unhealthful, has all the good effects of the most skilful selection
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What was Darwin's rudementory theory of natural selection?
Nature produces innumerable variations among living things, and some of these variations are selected and preserved by the survival and reproduction of their bearers
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What happens over time?
isolated populations become adapted to their surroundings
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What was Darwin unsure about?
what maintained the system of selection and why should there be improvement in species? – in terms of Artificial Selection, the answer is clear. Breader's pick
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What couldnt he accept?
Lamarck’s innate drive to perfection
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Malthus
Malthus proposed that although human productivity had improved, population growth always outstrips growth in the supply of goods, so that life is necessarily a struggle of too many people for too few resources.
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How is this related to Darwin's theory?
Creatures struggled over scarce resources and those who were ‘weak and unhealthful’ could not support themselves and died without offspring. The strong and healthy survived and procreated
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What was developed after Darwin?
• In ‘Man’s Place in Nature’ (1863/1954) by Huxley, he carefully related mankind to the living apes, lower animals, and fossil ancestors, showing that we did indeed evolve from lower forms of life, that no Creation was needed
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What did common people suggest?
science then became not just the destroyer of illusions, nut also a new metaphysics offering a new kind of salvation through science itself.
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What is paragraph 3?
What influenced those ideas
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Aristotle (300 BC)
• Aristotle soon believed in evolution: The Great Chain of Being, viewed by medieval’s as a measure of a creature’s nearness to God
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Mersenne and Descartes
If living things spontaneously changed in the course of their own development from life to death, then it became more plausible to think that living forms might alter themselves over great reaches of time
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Lamarckian
He proposed the first important theory of evolution, a romantic evolution.
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What is the Lamarckian theory?
organisms had to change their behaviour to survive and as organisms adapted to their surroundings, nature drove them from simple forms to increasingly more complex forms.
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What was this linked to?
a romantic claim that each living species possesses an innate drive to perfect itself.
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Therefore, what does each organism do?
Each organism strives to adapt itself to its surroundings and changes itself as it does so, developing various muscles, acquiring new physical traits or behavioural habits
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What would be the result?
Lamarck then claimed that a species preserves these acquired characteristics by somehow passing them on to its offspring. Thus, the results of each individual’s striving for perfection were preserved and passed on, and over generations
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What was wrong with this theory?
Modern genetics has destroyed this idea but in the absence of genetics this idea was plausible. Even Darwin believed it from time to time, although he never accepted the vitalist view of matter
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What else had paved the way for evolutionary thought?
• Contemporary discoveries in science and elsewhere also paved the way for evolutionary thought
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What had physicians descovered?
Physicians became more knowledgeable about the development of animals from fetus to adult form
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Therefore?
This developmental transformation was dramatic and qualitative, a change of form, not merely of size, as ancient accounts had suggested.
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What was becoming more likely?
The descendent with modification
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What is paragraph 4?
How have ideas influenced history and developmental psychology
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Psychology of adaption
Assuming evolution, one may ask how mind and behaviour, as distinct from bodily organs, help each creature adapt to its surroundings.
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How was skinner influenced by Darwin?
Skinner carefully modeled his radical behaviourism on Darwinian variation, selection and retention.
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What did Skinner underestimate?
tended to underestimate the degree to which each species, including homo sapiens, has a nature shaped by its evolutionary heritage
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Buss, 2011, is developing what
more complete picture of human nature: psychology of adaption
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What is another development after Darwin?
Social Darwinism
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What did Spencer 1880s argue?
At the end of the 1880's applied his contemporary social problems, producing a political theory
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What did he argue?
Natural selection should be allowed to take its course on the human species
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Therefore, what should to government do?
Nothing to help the poor, weak and helpless. In nature weak animals and their maladaptive hereditary traits are weeded out by natural selection
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what did he believe will help human failures?
will only serve to degrade the species by allowing them to have children and thus pass on their hereditry tendency to fail
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Social Darwinism had great appeal what sort of society?
capitalist society where it could justify even cutthroat competition on the grounds that such competition perfected humanity
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What was promised?
eventual perfection of the species, social Darwinism was profoundly conservative, for all reform was seen as tampering with nature’s laws
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What happened to social darwinism?
It declined in the 20th century
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What did Galton start?
The Psychology of adaptation
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What did Galton investigate
The study of individual differences is an essential part of Darwinian science, for without variation there can be no differential section and no evolutionary improvement of the species
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What did this encourage him to do?
find fingerprints and how each set of prints are unique to each person. He studied Eugenics in depth to discover how to make the most ‘fit’ humans improve the species.
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After Darwin what were psychologists trying to investigate?
After Darwin, psychologists began investigating individual differences. It then expended to Binet creating the intelligence test.
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What is the final influence that Darwin had?
Comparative psychology/Humans and animals
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What did the theory of revolution do to comparative psychology?
The theory of evolution, however, gave comparative psychology a powerful impetus, placing it in a wider biological context and giving it a s pecific rationale.
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Why did it begin?
Due to the publication of Darwin's expression of the emotions in man and animals, Darwin said that humans and animals have a lot in common which increased popularity of comparative psychology
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What did Morgan investigate?
Animal intelligence
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What did Morgan formulate?
Morgan’s Canon which argued that inferences of animal thinking should be no more than absolutely necessary to explain some observed behaviour
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Therefore what did it lead to?
Comparisons in learning, memory, emotions and even social interactions based on observations and experiments with animals
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For example?
Skinner
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Card 2

Front

What are the two components of evolution?

Back

An engine of change, a mechanism that creates offspring that are in some way different from their parents and the second, is a means of preserving changes

Card 3

Front

Therefore?

Back

Preview of the front of card 3

Card 4

Front

By Darwin's time, what was evolution?

Back

Preview of the front of card 4

Card 5

Front

What had Herbert spencer already done?

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Preview of the front of card 5
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