April 18, 2023
Having introduced in earlier posts the idea of a “science of purpose,” I would like now to reflect upon what most naturalists identify as Darwin’s crowning intellectual achievement: natural selection. It is worthwhile to recall that some fifty years before Darwin, renowned naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had already proclaimed that organisms change over time, a most radical view indeed. The word evolution would not be used to describe this transformation until about fifty years after Lamarck’s death. Darwin agreed with and fortified Lamarck’s claims with detailed descriptions of the variations among species. The concept that species change over time was by no means newly articulated by Darwin. The question […]