On the Origin of Species and Related Topics

Darwin, c. undefined 1854, when he was preparing On the Origin of Species for publication

Charles Darwin

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English naturalist, geologist and biologist, best known for his contributions to evolutionary biology.

A chalk drawing of the seven-year-old Darwin in 1816, with a potted plant, by Ellen Sharples

Bicentennial portrait by Anthony Smith of Darwin as a student, in the courtyard at Christ's College, Cambridge where he had rooms.

The round-the-world voyage of the Beagle, 1831–1836

Darwin (right) on the Beagle's deck at Bahía Blanca in Argentina, with fossils; caricature by Augustus Earle, the initial ship's artist.

As HMS Beagle surveyed the coasts of South America, Darwin theorised about geology and the extinction of giant mammals. Watercolour by the ship's artist Conrad Martens, who replaced Augustus Earle, in Tierra del Fuego.

While still a young man, Darwin joined the scientific elite. Portrait by George Richmond.

In mid-July 1837 Darwin started his "B" notebook on Transmutation of Species, and on page 36 wrote "I think" above his first evolutionary tree.

Darwin chose to marry his cousin, Emma Wedgwood.

Darwin in 1842 with his eldest son, William Erasmus Darwin

Darwin's "sandwalk" at Down House was his usual "Thinking Path".

Darwin aged 46 in 1855, by then working towards publication of his theory of natural selection. He wrote to Joseph Hooker about this portrait, "if I really have as bad an expression, as my photograph gives me, how I can have one single friend is surprising."

During the Darwin family's 1868 holiday in her Isle of Wight cottage, Julia Margaret Cameron took portraits showing the bushy beard Darwin grew between 1862 and 1866.

An 1871 caricature following publication of The Descent of Man was typical of many showing Darwin with an ape body, identifying him in popular culture as the leading author of evolutionary theory.

By 1878, an increasingly famous Darwin had suffered years of illness.

The adjoining tombs of John Herschel and Charles Darwin in the nave of Westminster Abbey, London

In 1881 Darwin was an eminent figure, still working on his contributions to evolutionary thought that had an enormous effect on many fields of science. Copy of a portrait by John Collier in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Unveiling of the Darwin Statue at the former Shrewsbury School building in 1897

In 1851 Darwin was devastated when his daughter Annie died. By then his faith in Christianity had dwindled, and he had stopped going to church.

A caricature of Darwin from a 1871 Vanity Fair

Statue of Darwin in the Natural History Museum, London

Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species.

Evolution

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Change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations.

In 1842, Charles Darwin penned his first sketch of On the Origin of Species.

DNA structure. Bases are in the centre, surrounded by phosphate–sugar chains in a double helix.

This diagram illustrates the twofold cost of sex. If each individual were to contribute to the same number of offspring (two), (a) the sexual population remains the same size each generation, where the (b) Asexual reproduction population doubles in size each generation.

Mutation followed by natural selection results in a population with darker colouration.

Simulation of genetic drift of 20 unlinked alleles in populations of 10 (top) and 100 (bottom). Drift to fixation is more rapid in the smaller population.

Homologous bones in the limbs of tetrapods. The bones of these animals have the same basic structure, but have been adapted for specific uses.

A baleen whale skeleton. Letters a and b label flipper bones, which were adapted from front leg bones, while c indicates vestigial leg bones, both suggesting an adaptation from land to sea.

Common garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis) has evolved resistance to the defensive substance tetrodotoxin in its amphibian prey.

Geographical isolation of finches on the Galápagos Islands produced over a dozen new species.

Tyrannosaurus rex. Non-avian dinosaurs died out in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period.

The hominoids are descendants of a common ancestor.

As evolution became widely accepted in the 1870s, caricatures of Charles Darwin with an ape or monkey body symbolised evolution.

The theory of evolution by natural selection was conceived independently by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the mid-19th century and was set out in detail in Darwin's book On the Origin of Species.

Natural selection

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Differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype.

Aristotle considered whether different forms could have appeared, only the useful ones surviving.

Part of Thomas Malthus's table of population growth in England 1780–1810, from his Essay on the Principle of Population, 6th edition, 1826

Charles Darwin noted that pigeon fanciers had created many kinds of pigeon, such as Tumblers (1, 12), Fantails (13), and Pouters (14) by selective breeding.

Evolutionary developmental biology relates the evolution of form to the precise pattern of gene activity, here gap genes in the fruit fly, during embryonic development.

During the industrial revolution, pollution killed many lichens, leaving tree trunks dark. A dark (melanic) morph of the peppered moth largely replaced the formerly usual light morph (both shown here). Since the moths are subject to predation by birds hunting by sight, the colour change offers better camouflage against the changed background, suggesting natural selection at work.

1: directional selection: a single extreme phenotype favoured. 2, stabilizing selection: intermediate favoured over extremes. 3: disruptive selection: extremes favoured over intermediate. X-axis: phenotypic trait Y-axis: number of organisms Group A: original population Group B: after selection

Different types of selection act at each life cycle stage of a sexually reproducing organism.

The peacock's elaborate plumage is mentioned by Darwin as an example of sexual selection, and is a classic example of Fisherian runaway, driven to its conspicuous size and coloration through mate choice by females over many generations.

Selection in action: resistance to antibiotics grows though the survival of individuals less affected by the antibiotic. Their offspring inherit the resistance.

The concept, published by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in a [[On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection|joint presentation of papers in 1858]], was elaborated in Darwin's influential 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Alfred Russel Wallace

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British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, biologist and illustrator.

Arenga pinnata sketched by Wallace on a visit to Celebes and later reworked by Walter Hood Fitch

A photograph from Wallace's autobiography shows the building Wallace and his brother John designed and built for the Neath Mechanics' Institute.

A map from The Malay Archipelago shows the physical geography of the archipelago and Wallace's travels around the area. The thin black lines indicate where Wallace travelled, and the red lines indicate chains of volcanoes.

An illustration from The Malay Archipelago depicts the flying frog Wallace discovered.

A photograph of Wallace taken in Singapore in 1862

Wallace's grave in Broadstone Cemetery, Broadstone, Dorset, which was restored by the A. R. Wallace Memorial Fund in 2000. It features a 7 ft tall fossil tree trunk from Portland mounted on a block of Purbeck limestone.

The Darwin–Wallace Medal was issued by the Linnean Society on the 50th anniversary of the reading of Darwin and Wallace's papers on natural selection. Wallace received the only gold example.

An illustration from the chapter on the application of natural selection to humans in Wallace's 1889 book Darwinism shows a chimpanzee.

A map of the world from The Geographical Distribution of Animals shows Wallace's six biogeographical regions.

The line separating the Indo-Malayan and the Austro-Malayan region in Wallace's On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago (1863)

Spirit photograph taken by Frederick Hudson of Wallace and his late mother; he may have used double exposure.

Wallace and his signature on the frontispiece of Darwinism (1889)

Anthony Smith's statue of Wallace, looking up at a bronze model of a Wallace's golden birdwing butterfly. Natural History Museum, London, unveiled 7 November 2013

Alfred Russel Wallace, attributed to John William Beaufort (1864–1943), a portrait in the Central Hall of the Natural History Museum, London.

Corvus enca celebensis, Sula Islands, registered in 1861 at a forerunner of Naturalis Biodiversity Center

Toxorhamphus novaeguineae novaeguineae, Misool, Raja Ampat Islands, 1865

Pitohui ferrugineus leucorhynchus, Waigeo, West-Papua, no year

Nectarinia jugularis clementiae, Seram Island, 1865

Mino anais anais, South West Papua, 1863

His paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858, which would later prompt Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species.

Several major ideas about evolution came together in the population genetics of the early 20th century to form the modern synthesis, including genetic variation, natural selection, and particulate (Mendelian) inheritance. This ended the eclipse of Darwinism and supplanted a variety of non-Darwinian theories of evolution.

Modern synthesis (20th century)

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The early 20th-century synthesis reconciling Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on heredity in a joint mathematical framework.

Darwin's pangenesis theory. Every part of the body emits tiny gemmules which migrate to the gonads and contribute to the next generation via the fertilised egg. Changes to the body during an organism's life would be inherited, as in Lamarckism.

Blending inheritance, implied by pangenesis, causes the averaging out of every characteristic, which as the engineer Fleeming Jenkin pointed out, would make evolution by natural selection impossible.

August Weismann's germ plasm theory. The hereditary material, the germplasm, is confined to the gonads and the gametes. Somatic cells (of the body) develop afresh in each generation from the germplasm.

Sewall Wright introduced the idea of a fitness landscape with local optima.

Drosophila pseudoobscura, the fruit fly which served as Theodosius Dobzhansky's model organism

E. B. Ford studied polymorphism in the scarlet tiger moth for many years.

Julian Huxley presented a serious but popularising version of the theory in his 1942 book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis.

Ernst Mayr argued that geographic isolation was needed to provide sufficient reproductive isolation for new species to form.

George Gaylord Simpson argued against the naive view that evolution such as of the horse took place in a "straight-line". He noted that any chosen line is one path in a complex branching tree, natural selection having no imposed direction.

Speciation via polyploidy: a diploid cell may fail to separate during meiosis, producing diploid gametes which self-fertilize to produce a fertile tetraploid zygote that cannot interbreed with its parent species.

Ant societies have evolved elaborate caste structures, widely different in size and function.

Evolutionary developmental biology has formed a synthesis of evolutionary and developmental biology, discovering deep homology between the embryogenesis of such different animals as insects and vertebrates.

A 21st century tree of life showing horizontal gene transfers among prokaryotes and the saltational endosymbiosis events that created the eukaryotes, neither fitting into the 20th century's modern synthesis

Inputs to the modern synthesis, with other topics (inverted colours) such as developmental biology that were not joined with evolutionary biology until the turn of the 21st century

Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species was successful in convincing most biologists that evolution had occurred, but was less successful in convincing them that natural selection was its primary mechanism.

Diagram from the 1844 book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers shows a model of development where fish (F), reptiles (R), and birds (B) represent branches from a path leading to mammals (M).

Transmutation of species

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Transmutation of species and transformism are 18th and 19th-century evolutionary ideas about the change of one species into another that preceded Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.

This 1847 diagram by Richard Owen shows his conceptual archetype for all vertebrates.

Diagram from the 1844 book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation by Robert Chambers shows a model of development where fishes (F), reptiles (R), and birds (B) represent branches from a path leading to mammals (M).

Transmutation was one of the names commonly used for evolutionary ideas in the 19th century before Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species (1859).

The tree of life as depicted by Ernst Haeckel in The Evolution of Man (1879) illustrates the 19th-century view of evolution as a progressive process leading towards man.

History of evolutionary thought

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Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity—in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Church Fathers as well as in medieval Islamic science.

The Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletus argued that humans originated from fish.

Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail from The School of Athens (1509—1511) by Raphael

Augustine of Hippo, shown in this sixth-century AD Roman fresco, wrote that some creatures may have developed from the "decomposition" of previously existing organisms.

A page from the Kitāb al-Hayawān (Book of Animals) by al-Jāḥiẓ

Pierre Belon compared the skeletons of humans (left) and birds (right) in his L'Histoire de la nature des oyseaux (The Natural History of Birds) (1555).

Richard Owen's 1861 geological timescale from Palæontology, showing the appearance of major animal types

Lamarck's two-factor theory involves a complexifying force driving animal body plans towards higher levels (orthogenesis) creating a ladder of phyla, and an adaptive force causing animals with a given body plan to adapt to circumstances (use and disuse, inheritance of acquired characteristics), creating a diversity of species and genera.

Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) shows fish (F), reptiles (R), and birds (B) branching from a path leading to mammals (M).

Richard Owen's 1848 diagram shows his conceptual archetype for all vertebrates.

Charles Darwin's first sketch of an evolutionary tree from his "B" notebook on the transmutation of species (1837–1838)

Othniel Charles Marsh's diagram of the evolution of horse feet and teeth over time as reproduced in Thomas Henry Huxley's Prof. Huxley in America (1876).

This illustration (the root of The March of Progress ) was the frontispiece of Thomas Henry Huxley's book Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863). Huxley applied Darwin's ideas to humans, using comparative anatomy to show that humans and apes had a common ancestor, which challenged the theologically important idea that humans held a unique place in the universe.

This photo from Henry Fairfield Osborn's 1917 book Origin and Evolution of Life shows models depicting the evolution of Titanothere horns over time, which Osborn claimed was an example of an orthogenetic trend in evolution.

Diagram from Thomas Hunt Morgan's 1919 book The Physical Basis of Heredity, showing the sex-linked inheritance of the white-eyed mutation in Drosophila melanogaster.

A phylogenetic tree showing the three-domain system. Eukaryotes are colored red, archaea green, and bacteria blue.

Robert Chambers's Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) shows fishes (F), reptiles (R), and birds (B) branching from a path leading to mammals (M).

In 1858 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published a new evolutionary theory, explained in detail in Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859).

Species

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Basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity.

A region of the gene for the cytochrome c oxidase enzyme is used to distinguish species in the Barcode of Life Data Systems database.

The cladistic or phylogenetic species concept is that a species is the smallest lineage which is distinguished by a unique set of either genetic or morphological traits. No claim is made about reproductive isolation, making the concept useful also in palaeontology where only fossil evidence is available.

A chronospecies is defined in a single lineage (solid line) whose morphology changes with time. At some point, palaeontologists judge that enough change has occurred that two species (A and B), separated in time and anatomy, once existed.

A cougar, mountain lion, panther, or puma, among other common names: its scientific name is Puma concolor.

The type specimen (holotype) of Lacerta plica, described by Linnaeus in 1758

Ernst Mayr proposed the widely used Biological Species Concept of reproductive isolation in 1942.

Palaeontologists are limited to morphological evidence when deciding whether fossil life-forms like these Inoceramus bivalves formed a separate species.

Horizontal gene transfers between widely separated species complicate the phylogeny of bacteria.

John Ray believed that species breed true and do not change, even though variations exist.

Carl Linnaeus created the binomial system for naming species.

Blackberries belong to any of hundreds of microspecies of the Rubus fruticosus species aggregate.

The butterfly genus Heliconius contains many similar species.

The Hypsiboas calcaratus–fasciatus species complex contains at least six species of treefrog.

Seven "species" of Larus gulls interbreed in a ring around the Arctic.

Opposite ends of the ring: a herring gull (Larus argentatus) (front) and a lesser black-backed gull (Larus fuscus) in Norway

A greenish warbler, Phylloscopus trochiloides

Presumed evolution of five "species" of greenish warblers around the Himalayas

Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species explained how species could arise by natural selection.

Woodburytype print of Huxley (1880 or earlier)

Thomas Henry Huxley

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English biologist and anthropologist specialising in comparative anatomy.

HMS Rattlesnake by the ship's artist Oswald Brierly

Australian woman: Pencil drawing by Huxley

Huxley's grave in East Finchley Cemetery in north London

Huxley's sketch of then hypothetical five-toed Eohippus being ridden by "Eohomo"

The frontispiece to Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863): the image compares the skeletons of apes to humans. The gibbon (left) is double size.

Caricature of Huxley by
Carlo Pellegrini in Vanity Fair 1871

Thomas Henry Huxley, c. 1885, from a carte de visite

Huxley (right) and Richard Owen inspect a "water baby" in Edward Linley Sambourne's 1881 illustration

It is to this question that much of Darwin's On the Origin of Species was devoted.

A 2016 (metagenomic) representation of the tree of life using ribosomal protein sequences

Tree of life (biology)

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Fold-out paleontological chart of Edward Hitchcock in 'Elementary Geology' (1840)

The tree of life image that appeared in Darwin's On the Origin of Species, 1859. It was the book's only illustration

Page from Darwin's notebooks around July 1837, showing his first sketch of an evolutionary tree, with the words "I think" at the top

David Hillis's 2008 plot of the tree of life, based on completely sequenced genomes

Haeckel's Stammbaum der Primaten (1860s)

Haeckel's tree of life in Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866)

The tree of life as seen by Haeckel in The Evolution of Man (1879)

Augustin Augier's 1801 Arbre botanique ("Botanical Tree")<ref name="Hellström 2019"/>

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's 1809 depiction of the origins of animal groups in his Philosophie zoologique with branching evolutionary paths

Diagram in Robert Chambers's 1844 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

Diagram in Darwin's On the Origin of Species, 1859. It was the book's only illustration.

A tree for rRNA genes, showing the three life domains Bacteria, Archaea, and Eukaryota, with the LUCA as its root, 2009

The tree of life or universal tree of life is a metaphor, model and research tool used to explore the evolution of life and describe the relationships between organisms, both living and extinct, as described in a famous passage in Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859).

A report on On the Origin of Species

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