Portal:Evolutionary biology/Selected article/4
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Evolutionary thought has roots in antiquity as philosophical ideas known to the Greeks, Romans, Indians, Chinese and Muslims. Until the 18th century, however, Western biological thought was dominated by essentialism, the idea that living forms are static and unchanging in time. During the Enlightenment, evolutionary cosmology and the mechanical philosophy spread from the physical sciences to natural history, and naturalists such as Maupertuis and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon focused on the variability of species. The emergence of paleontology (and with it the notion of extinction), as well as the dramatic expansion of known species, helped undermine the traditional static view of nature. The first full theory of evolution was proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in the early 19th century; Lamarck's theory was based on the idea that species had an innate drive that pushed them up the great chain of being and that the mechanism of inheritance of acquired characteristics helped them adapt to local conditions. The evolutionary theory often referred to as Darwinism was first publicly put forth by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace and discussed in detail in On the Origin of Species, published by Darwin in 1859. Darwinism, which unlike Lamarck's theory proposed common descent and a branching tree of life, was based on natural selection, and synthesized a wide range of evidence from animal husbandry, biogeography, geology, morphology, and embryology. The debate over Origin would play a key role in the displacement of natural theology by methodological naturalism in the life sciences, and raised profound questions about human nature and the place of humanity in the natural world.
