History of Evolution
- Lafyva
- May 24, 2020
- 1 min read
Updated: Aug 24
The idea of a modern project of improving the human population through a statistical understanding of heredity used to encourage good breeding was originally developed by Francis Galton. Galton had read his half-cousin Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which sought to explain the development of plant and animal species, and desired to apply it to humans.
Charles Darwin popularized the term ""natural selection"", and compared it with artificial selection. Debate over Darwin's work led to the rapid acceptance of the general concept of evolution, but the specific mechanism he proposed, natural selection, was not widely accepted until it was revived by developments in biology that occurred during the 1920s through the 1940s.
The idea of evolution by natural selection was proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, but evolutionary biology, as an academic discipline in its own right, emerged during the period of the modern synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s.
Eugenics was widely accepted in the U.S. academic community.
By 1928, there were 376 separate university courses in some of the United States' leading schools, enrolling more than 20,000 students, which included eugenics in the curriculum.
HALDANE AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
Ernst Mayr's interactions with J. B. S. Haldane
The Modern Synthesis Evolution and the Organization of Information https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-86422-4
Evolutionary biology has been a remarkably dynamic area since its foundation. Its true complexity, however, has been concealed in the last 50 years under an assumed opposition between the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis” and an “Alternative to the Evolutionary Synthesis”.
