Chapter 22 - Descent with modification: A Darwinian view of life. This chapter presents the following content: Western culture resisted evolutionary views of life, theories of geologic gradualism helped clear the path for evolutionary biologists, lamarck placed fossils in an evolutionary context. | CHAPTER 22 Descent with Modification: A Darwinian View of Life Copyright © 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings Section A: Historical Context for Evolutionary Theory 1. Western culture resisted evolutionary views of life 2. Theories of geologic gradualism helped clear the path for evolutionary biologists 3. Lamarck placed fossils in an evolutionary context On November 24, 1959, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin’s book drew a cohesive picture of life by connecting what had once seemed a bewildering array of unrelated facts. Darwin made two points in The Origin of Species: Today’s organisms descended from ancestral species. Natural selection provided a mechanism for evolutionary change in populations. Introduction Copyright © 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings The Origin of Species challenged a worldview that had been accepted for centuries. The key classical Greek philosophers who influenced Western culture, Plato and Aristotle, opposed any concept of evolution. Plato believed in two worlds: one real world that is ideal and perfect and an illusory world of imperfection that we perceive through our senses. Aristotle believed that all living forms could be arranged on a ladder (scala naturae) of increasing complexity with every rung taken with perfect, permanent species. 1. Western culture resisted evolutionary views of life Copyright © 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings The Old Testament account of creation fortified the idea that species were individually designed and did not evolve. In the 1700s, the dominant philosophy, natural theology, was dedicated to studying the adaptations of organisms as evidence that the Creator had designed each species for a purpose. At this time, Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, developed taxonomy, a system for naming species and grouping species into a hierarchy of increasingly complex categories. | CHAPTER 22 Descent with Modification: A Darwinian View of Life Copyright © 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings Section A: Historical Context for Evolutionary Theory 1. Western culture resisted evolutionary views of life 2. Theories of geologic gradualism helped clear the path for evolutionary biologists 3. Lamarck placed fossils in an evolutionary context On November 24, 1959, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin’s book drew a cohesive picture of life by connecting what had once seemed a bewildering array of unrelated facts. Darwin made two points in The Origin of Species: Today’s organisms descended from ancestral species. Natural selection provided a mechanism for evolutionary change in populations. Introduction Copyright © 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings The Origin of Species challenged a worldview that had been accepted for centuries. The key classical Greek philosophers .
