Thomas Malthus:
thomas malthus wasn't a scientist, he was a economist who studied accumulated figures on birth, deaths,age of marriage and other statistical information. his studies primarily focused on the population rate and survival rate of all living things, further more his studies heavily contributed to the theory of natural selection. Thomas believed in the "eat or be eaten" mentality, the weak die off and the strong survive and become stronger over time and reproduce with strong genes. on the other hand, Darwin created the theory of natural selection with Thomas theory in mind. i personally dont think darwin could have developed his theory without malthus theory, they go hand and hand and are also building blocks for one another. And also i don't think the attitude of the church had a an effect on whether or not darwin's book, darwin made a book off of his studies and his educated strong beliefs regardless of what the church thought.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Malthus.html
Hello Taline,
ReplyDeletegreat blog post! I agree that Thomas Malthus did have a great influence on Darwin. I also agree that the churches attitude and thoughts did not affect Darwin in publishing his work. I just think that Darwin may have delayed a bit because of what the church would do or say. I choose Alfred Russel Wallace because Darwin and him were great competitors.
Thanks,
Jennifer Hernandez
Okay for your initial background but you took a wrong turn with this comment:
ReplyDelete"Thomas believed in the "eat or be eaten" mentality, the weak die off and the strong survive and become stronger over time and reproduce with strong genes. "
No, Malthus wasn't concerned with who survived to reproduce and whether they were strong or not. He focused on the issue of overpopulation across the group in general and the effects on the population due to limited resources, i.e., famine, disease and death. Darwin was the one who took this point on limited resources and asked the question "Who is surviving" to recognize that competition would have a patterned response of surival, not a random one. This is an important connection to understand.
"i personally dont think darwin could have developed his theory without malthus theory, they go hand and hand and are also building blocks for one another."
While I tend to agree, this doesn't really explain why Malthus' influence was so strong on Darwin's work. Darwin's work wasn't a building block for Malthus, so I'm not sure how that supports your argument.
Darwin delayed publishing for more than 20 years. That is not insignificant and needs to be recognized. Darwin initially published a paper (jointly with Wallace), not the book, which came afterward. So why did Darwin delay? What were his concerns? And how did the influence of the church play a role in his hesitancy to publish?
An aside: These posts should be handled as papers, not texts or tweets. Each point should be addressed fully and with detail, formatted correctly with paragraphs to make it easier for your readers to review (and grade). Don't be afraid to show me what you know. Expand.