The ideas about the common origin and gradual transformation of species are at least 2,600 years old, when they were interpreted by the ancient Greek philosopher Anaximander. Others with similar ideas were the Greek Empedocles, the Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius, the Arab biologist Al-Jahiz, the Persian philosopher Ibn Miskawaih, the Brotherhood of Purity, and the Chinese philosopher Zhuang. As knowledge of nature increased, ideas about evolution were developed by some natural philosophers, including Pierre Maupertuis in 1745 and Erasmus Darwin.In 1796, Lamarck's theory of species transformation was particularly influential. Charles Darwin came up with the idea of natural selection in 1838 and was just developing his theory when, in 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace sent him his own, almost identical one. They agreed on a joint presentation and presented their theory for the first time in July of the same year before the Linnean Society in London. Darwin's work The Origin of Species, published in 1859, explained natural selection in detail, and the evidence for evolution presented in it convinced experts and the general public of this phenomenon.
Discussions about the mechanism of evolution had only just begun, since Darwin could not explain the origin of hereditary variations influenced by natural selection. Like Lamarck, he thought that parents passed on to their offspring the adaptations they acquired during their lifetime; this theory was later renamed Lamarckism. In the 1880s, August Weisman proved in practice that changes occur due to the use of or. disuse is not inherited, and eventually Lamarckism was overcome. More importantly, Darwin could not explain how character traits are passed down from generation to generation. In 1865, it was Gregor Mendel who discovered that traits are inherited according to certain statistical principles, but his work did not receive much attention at the time. With the rediscovery of Mendel's work at the beginning of the 20th century, the contradictions between the first geneticists and biometrics developed into a split between supporters of the Mendelian and Darwinian models of evolution.
Nevertheless, the rediscovery of Mendel's work on the basics of genetics (which Darwin and Wallace knew nothing about) gave rise to research aimed at better understanding how the diversity of animal and plant traits arises. Although Hugo de Vries and other early geneticists were skeptical of the theory of evolution, it was their work that laid the foundation on which the theory of evolution stood even more firmly than before.
The apparent conflict between Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and Mendel's discoveries was overcome in the 1920s and 1930s by evolutionary biologists such as J. B. S. Haldane, Sewell Wright, and especially Ronald Fisher, who laid the foundations of population genetics. The result was a combination of evolution with natural selection and inheritance in accordance with Mendelian principles, which is now considered a modern synthesis of evolution. In the 1940s, another physical basis of heredity was discovered. The key to this was the discovery of Oswald Avery and his colleagues that DNA is a genetic material, and the discovery of James Watson and Francis Crick, who deciphered the structure of this molecule. Since then, genetics and molecular biology have become an integral part of evolutionary biology, revolutionizing the field of phylogenetics.
In the early years, evolutionary biology was mainly studied by scientists from fields that traditionally dealt with taxonomy and solved evolutionary problems based on knowledge about individual groups of organisms. Later, however, evolutionary biology as a discipline gradually gained importance and began to attract scientists of a broader biological profile. Today, biologists from fields such as biochemistry, ecology, genetics, and physiology are involved in the study of evolutionary problems, and indirectly these concepts are used even in more distant fields such as psychology, medicine, philosophy, etc. Disfruta de juegos populares en
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