- What did Thomas Malthus say and how did it influence Darwin? How did these ideas combine with the idea of âvariation between individualsâ to produce a new theory.?
- Compare natural selection and artificial selection. What role does purpose and progress play in each kind of selection?
- Give a factual example of natural selection at work. (explain how it works in this example).
- What were Darwinâs five theses according to Ernst Mayr?
- What is Social Darwinism. In what ways does it contradict Darwinâs theory?
- What factors led to Darwin getting the lionâs share of credit for evolution rather than sharing it with Wallace?
Sample Answer
Thomas Malthus was an English economist who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In his book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus argued that human populations would inevitably grow faster than the food supply, leading to widespread famine and death.
Malthus’s ideas had a profound influence on Charles Darwin, who was working on his theory of evolution at the time. Darwin realized that Malthus’s principle of population growth could explain why there was a constant struggle for existence among living things.
The idea of variation between individuals was another key concept that Darwin incorporated into his theory of evolution. Darwin observed that individuals within a species vary in many ways, such as size, strength, and speed. He argued that these variations were caused by chance mutations, and that some variations were more likely to help an individual survive and reproduce in a given environment.
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