The Advent of the Modern Fauna
The Advent of the Modern Fauna
On the Births and Deaths of Species, 1801–1831
This chapter talks about the earliest decades of the scientific study of “transmutation,” previously called evolution, in which early evolutionists focused on the search for a natural causal explanation for the origin of species alive today. The two contrasting positions that have dominated evolutionary thought came from two naturalists who based their theories on empirical data drawn from a comparison of fossil mollusks—Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Giambattista Brocchi. The chapter examines the ideas of both Lamarck and Brocchi, most of which were published in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, which was founded by Robert Jameson. Jameson was Charles Darwin's teacher at the University of Edinburgh. Darwin's exposure to scientific analysis, natural history, and transmutational thinking continued at Cambridge where he read John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on Natural Philosophy, a book that influenced him to pursue a scientific career.
Keywords: transmutation, origin of species, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Giambattista Brocchi, Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, Robert Jameson, Charles Darwin, John Herschel
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