Week 1
1) From the List of the individuals on Darwin's work that would have the most influence is Thomas Malthus. Seeing as though from his work that he published "An Essay On the Principle of Population" in 1798.
2) A contribution Thomas Malthus made to the scientific community was by combining the relationship between food supply and human population. He argued that humans don't overpopulate until the point of starvation, but they see the error of their ways and change their way of living so they can avoid further destitution to humanity. Malthus also argues that food supply does increase and that human population increases at a much faster rate, but there are ways that humans take to reduce the increase of population by having safe sex and producing more food.
3) One of the bullet points that mostly affect with Thomas Malthus' work was the resources are limited. With resources being limited it it makes it that much more harder for species to continue to their full nature instead of just being limited by the resources in their environment. In Thomas Malthus' essay "An Essay On the Principle of Population", he explained that species in their environment grow and reproduce at a much faster pace than what the environment can supply so only a select few can evolve from it and leaving the rest to die off.
4) I don't think Charles Darwin could of developed his theory of natural selection without the influences and ideas of Thomas Malthus because Malthus gave great evidence in his work that those finding are what inspired Darwin to be so fascinated in the first place, with Malthus as an inspiration, I believe Darwin wouldn't have been as interested in his evolution theories as much as he was.
5) The attitude of the church affected Charles Darwin because the Church was pretty much against all evidence that showed humans or any forms of species didn't come from God's creation but were apart of an evolution theory. Since the Church had so much power, it made it hard for Darwin to reveal his findings and had to hide them from the public until the right time came for him to publish his book "On the Origins of Species". It took Darwin about 23 years to finally publish his book and fully express his findings.
Work Cited:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Malthus.html
-Corey Sims
For the most part, I agree with your background on Malthus, but you are presenting him as a much more positive individual than he actually was. Instead of presenting what humans do in response to reduce resources, Malthus was actually spreading a message of doom, warning what would happen to the human population if they didn't start controlling their population growth, namely famine, disease and death. He was trying to argue for population control, through such things as birth control, to prevent these disasters from happening.
ReplyDeleteGood explanation in part three. This logical step of recognizing that not all organisms are equally successful to trying to figure out who does survive and why (better adaptations) was a key step for Darwin.
I agree that Malthus was crucial to Darwin's work, but Darwin had already been considering issue of evolutionary theory before reading Malthus' essay. Until then, his ideas had been unorganized.
Good final section and good first post for the class.
Hey Corey!
ReplyDeleteJust like you, I chose that Thomas Malthus was the most influential during the time of Darwin's work. He helped push Darwin to have faith in hypothesis (natural selection) and that he was on the right path to success. Knowing that someone else was some-what thinking in the same direction gives anyone the courage to persuade their original idea. I agree with a majority of your answers except for when you said that Darwin could not develop his theory without the help of Malthus. Like I just stated, Darwin already had the idea of natural selection and his hypothesis about it, Malthus just pushed him to pursue his hypothesis with more confidence. Other than that your response was very good and clear! Good job!
-Danni Thompson