Talk:Edward Blyth

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[edit] Eisely-centric

This account relies way too heavily on the work of Loren Eiseley, which is not very well respected for its historical accuracy anymore. This really needs some updating using historiography from at least the 1980s, much less things more current. --Fastfission 21:03, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Creationism

"Blyth was also a Christian, and probably would be branded today as a creationist" I removed this sentence as unhelpful, but it has been reinstated. I do not see why it is appropriate to label 19th century biologists with anachronistic terms taken from modern debates. The claim also comes close to the weaselly implication that a Christian is necessarily a creationist, which is both provocatively POV and untrue. Myopic Bookworm 09:16, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Darwin's copies of Blyth's articles

I have removed the comment about Darwin's copies of Blyth's articles being in the University of Cambridge Library, and the corresponding reference. This information was taken from a page on my web site, and more recent research indicates that the journals are not held at that location now. I am still trying to find out what has happened to them.
Andrew Bradbury. 09:22, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Blyth and nat sel

"Blyth had discussed natural selection, but Eiseley didn't realize that most biologists did so in the generations before Darwin. Natural selection ranked as a standard item in biological discourse – but with a crucial difference from Darwin's version: the usual interpretation invoked natural selection as part of a larger argument for created permanency."

This section goes way, way too far. At heart there is a confusion between differential mortality (an everyday farmyard occurrence) and natural selection, which is a fully-fledged scientific hypothesis. In WP our job is to reflect standard knowledge, as indicated by suitable references: it's an encyclopaedia. Standard thinking is that only a few people anticipated Darwin on this topic, and none of them produced the full concept.

Blyth was certainly one of these; William Charles Wells, and Patrick Matthews would also qualify. There were more who wrote about some kind of evolution, and a few who anticipated particulate inheritance. The section in question needs to be more conservative; it's got too much personal opinion in it..

Macdonald-ross (talk) 07:24, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I now realise that a contributor has copied much of this content from a Stephen Gould article Natural selection as a creative force, without crediting it. The nub of it is that Gould here interprets natural selection in such a broad manner that almost any account of natural death is incorporated. I draw attention to a scientific definition of natural selection in Endler J.A. 1986. Natural selection in the wild. Princeton page 4. This definition calls for [abbreviated]
1. Variation among individuals
2. Differences in fitness
3. Inheritance
And if those requirements are met, then:
5. The trait frequency distribution will vary amongst age classes or life history stages
6. If the population is not at equilibrium then the trait distribution of all offspring will be predictably different from the distribution of all parents.
In Darwin's case, as we know, his account was arranged as follows (as for instance Huxley J.S. 1942. Evolution the modern synthesis. p14:
1. tendency of organisms to increase in number geometrically
2. but numbers remain roughly constant, therefore a struggle for existence occurs
3. All organisms vary appreciably, and some/much of the variation is heritable
4. Therefore the effects of differential survival will accumulate from generation to generation.
In both these cases the term 'natural selection' is hedged with requirements which are only partly met even by Wells, Blyth and Matthew. Hence Gould's "Natural selection ranked as a standard item in biological discourse" [said of pre-Darwinian biologists] is just not true if we use the term as Darwin did and as we do now.
On this basis, I intend to cool down some of the rhetoric in these pre-Darwinian pages with a more balanced account.

Macdonald-ross (talk) 19:12, 19 January 2008 (UTC)