Charles Darwin 200
 

Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago. His theory on 'the origin of species by means of natural selection' was revolutionary and it remains to this day as one of the bases for modern biology and understanding of nature.

Congratulations Charles!

Please, extend your congrats and discuss.

EDIT: Whoops, this was meant for General Discussion. If someone could move it there it would be much apreciated.

Congratulations to a man who said "No, that's weird, let's think for a bit." when people believed in things like fly larvae spontaneously "appearing" from rotten meat and such.

Also, I'd just like to comment, I mean, I know you're from Finland but so's the wikipedia link. We aren't from Finland. Mostly.

You infidels! Well fine, I'll change it.

Truth be told, I din't realize it. Man, first thread I start in ages and already I've made two mistakes.

Francesco Redi was the main guy who dealt with spontaneous generation. Darwin's struggle was mostly against Lamarckism.

Sigh. I totally don't understadn why Darwin gets any credit at all.
He didn't invent anything, all he did was collect existing theories together and write about them in a way that everyone could understand, thus capturing the publics imagination.
Well that and most of his works were more reminiscient of his social and political wranglings than any actual science, which will hit you pretty strongly if you read Origin of Species (mostly the earlier editions, the later editions were much tighter).
It was practically a manifesto.
Saint-Hilaire was totally the king.

...Whoops. My bad.

...So then, that means he went and said "No, just because you run all the time it doesn't mean your children will be great at running." or something along the lines instead.

Don't forget Lincoln! They were birthday buddies!

Well a few other people said it first but he collected heaps of examples (mostly of birds) and put it together in a readable form.
Importantly he was also used as a tool to carry evolution to the general public and the theory which had been around for a while suddenly exploded onto the public stage.

He didn't invent evolution, no. However, he did do this:

As well as study the details and add his own insights. Or do you think we would have the understanding of evolution we do if someone hadn't gone and made sense of the whole business and made the idea accessible to the common man? Also I'm pretty sure Lamarckian evolution was still the norm prior to The Origin of Species, so it's not like he was writing what everyone already "knew."

Basically, he didn't discover evolution in the same way that Newton didn't discover gravity (although Newton did more technical work for gravity than Darwin did for evolution).

Well, Lamarckian theory was already crumbling before Darwin published, and other researchers were pursuing similar theories. In fact, Darwin was kind of surprised into publishing before he wanted to by Alfred Wallace, who wrote a paper very similar to Darwin's own theory of natural selection.

Basically, I think if Darwin hadn't done it then someone else would have, and probably within the same time period.