The origins, evolution, and future of evolutionary theory

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the origins, evolution, and future of evolutionary theory.

 

There were, and are, people who argued for evolution before Darwin, so why is he the first to be recognized? In the following article, I’ll try to give you a little more information about the theory of evolution: its origins, how it developed, what it says, and how it compares to other theories. Before we get started, let’s explain what evolutionary theory is and what we’re talking about in this article. Evolutionary theory has both narrow and broad meanings: in the narrow sense, evolutionary theory refers to theories about the factors that cause organisms to evolve, and in the broad sense, evolutionary theory refers to the field of study that studies the evolution of organisms. In this article, we’ll use the former term.
In the mid-18th century, there were signs of a new science emerging in France. The spread of Newtonian mechanics, which established the idea of causal change in nature, laid down a vast blueprint of an unknowable blueprint. From Maupertuis, who wrote about the principle of natural selection, to Lamarck, who saw human beings as the dissipation of historical changes in nature, we can see that a new idea different from creationism was beginning to emerge at the time, but unfortunately, they did not grasp the blueprint of the new theory of evolution. Lamarck was the first to systematize the theory of evolution and the first to build on its blueprint. Lamarck argued that “all living things evolve toward more complex and complete forms,” and he adopted this property as the main cause of evolution, which he called progressivity, and he also adopted the frequently used “soluble theory” of evolution, which states that some organs develop and others degenerate, as the direction of progressivity. However, it was Darwin, the first to establish the theory of evolution, who properly realized, used, and widely disseminated the use of blueprints. This Darwin is Charles Robert Darwin (C.R. Darwin), the author of the well-known book On the Origin of Species. There was another Darwin with the same name, E. Darwin, who was C.R. Darwin’s grandfather, and all the Darwins that follow are C.R. Darwin. Darwin rejected the theory of dissolution and chose natural selection based on the variability of living things, their inheritance, and the finite nature of resources as the main cause of evolution, and emphasized the survival of the best in the flow of time according to the principle of natural selection. Although they claimed different things, the two theories were the first to appear in the world.
Just as guns have improved and diversified, evolutionary theory has evolved since Lamarck and Darwin, and new theories have emerged along the way. Wagner and Gulick, who emphasized the importance of geographical isolation in speciation; Negeli and Eimer, who focused on the direction of evolution; Kopp, who proposed neo-Lamarckism, which states that acquired traits are inherited by the organism and that the accumulation of traits leads to the evolution of the organism; Weismann, who proposed neo-Darwinism, which added genetic concepts to Darwin’s theory of evolution; and Mendel, who is famous for his peas, In particular, Weismann’s germplasm lecture and the rediscovery of Mendelianism in the 1900s had a major impact on genetics, with the former being the view that it is the germplasm that is inherited across generations, while somatic qualities are not inherited, thus rejecting Lamarck’s insoluble theory, which presupposed the inheritance of acquired traits, and the latter being the basis for the development of chromosome theory based on the vast experimental and statistical data that resulted.
From the 1930s, attempts to synthesize evolutionary theory began to appear, starting with Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937). The main contents of the synthesis include the organization and expansion of concepts in the fields of paleontology and biology, centering on chromosome theory, population genetics, and the concept of species, the complete denial of acquired trait inheritance, the explanation of the gradualness and mutation of the evolutionary process, and the direction of evolution following natural selection. Since 1960, the development of evolutionary theory has accelerated based on the advances in science and technology such as microscopy and analytical techniques and the results of previous research, and various controversies have arisen accordingly, such as whether evolution is regular, gradual, irregular, or radical, and whether the unit of natural selection is an individual, a population, or a gene. In particular, the unit of natural selection has been a central debate in evolutionary theory since the discovery of genes, and even after the discovery of genes, Darwin advocated an individual-centered theory, Lorenz, Wynn Edwards, Wilson, and others advocated group selection, and Hamilton and Dawkins advocated a gene theory, and it remains an unsolved issue that continues to be debated among prominent scholars.
In this brief history of evolutionary theory, we’ve focused on comparing different theories within evolutionary theory. However, while the debate between theories within evolutionary theory presupposes that evolutionary theory is correct, there is a broader debate that takes place without that presupposition. This is the debate between theories other than evolutionary theory, and the debate between creationism, the theory most opposed to evolutionary theory, which has been going on since the beginning of evolutionary theory, and which we will now describe.
The theory of evolution, like all great new scientific theories, was met with great opposition. Like geocentrism, which rejected the idea that God’s Earth was not the center of the universe, creationism rejected the idea that our ancestors were not Adam and Eve, claiming it was a blasphemy against the Bible. Of course, even religious authority cannot deny a scientifically proven and widely accepted fact, so even within Bible-based religions such as Christianity, the theory of perpetual motion was abandoned, and Adam and Eve, who were accepted as the ancestors of mankind, changed their symbolism to the ancestors of religion as it was proved that there was no earth and mankind even 6000 years before their birth and the creation of the heavens and earth. Of course, the admission of some of the content did not bury creationism, and it is still in dispute with evolutionary theory because evolutionary theory can explain microevolution, which is evolution in the sense of development within a species, but not macroevolution, which is differentiation from species to species, and there are several theories within evolutionary theory. Nowadays, creationism is not just a purely religious theory, but also a science-based theory, and in fact, the current creationism accepts the idea of microevolution, so the main difference between modern creationism and evolutionary theory is whether the first life was created or naturally occurred, and whether evolution from species to species occurs. Of course, as with evolutionary theory, there are different theories within the creationist camp, and there are even attempts to conflate the two by introducing the term “creative evolution,” but I don’t think this is relevant to the topic of this article, which is evolutionary theory.
There is no perfect theory in the world. Newtonian mechanics, which seems so empirically and commonsensically correct, has been shown to be imperfect by quantum mechanics and relativity, and even quantum mechanics and relativity have incompatible contradictions, so at least one or both theories must be wrong. Even in mathematics, where once something is fully proven, it must be true forever, there are still unresolved questions about what hasn’t been proven. But just as a test score that isn’t a perfect 100 isn’t meaningless and a grade that isn’t an A+ isn’t unnecessary, so too is a theory that isn’t perfect. Besides, all theories evolve. Similarly, theories about the origins of life, such as evolution, will continue to evolve as open questions are resolved by rediscovery, new theories emerge, or new discoveries are made as science advances, and we learn more about our past.