Darwin and evolution

GET1020

Dr John van Wyhe

Contents © J. van Wyhe et al. The reproduction of

these slides is against national and international law.
Illegal distribution or sale will be prosecuted.
• Who teaches this module?
– See my homepage:
http://darwin-online.org.uk/people/van_wyhe.html

• Is this a science or history module?

Darwin Online
A mostly accurate and entertaining
illustrated introduction to Darwin and this
story: Introducing Darwin: A graphic
guide. (at Bookhaven, Utown etc.)

For an even briefer overview, of just the

Darwin part of the story, see my article in
New Scientist (‘van Wyhe, Darwin's
discovery’ on LumiNUS)

For an overview of the scholarly literature

on this subject see:

Greg Radick, Charles Darwin. In Oxford

Bibliographies in Evolutionary Biology.
• What is this course about?

• Are lecture notes provided? No.

You are here to learn how to make your own.
• If you don’t know how to take notes, Google
some useful sites, such as this one.

• Details of lectures, readings, exams etc. are on

LimiNUS
(as are many of the readings and lecture slides)
• The lecture slides are revised every semester so
each one will be uploaded the night before the
lecture- these are not class notes- they are just
illustrations.
• Do not rely on notes from previous students.
Who was Charles Darwin?
 What is evolution?

(Hint- this popular sort of image is not evolution…)

Creation stories…
For ancient Egyptians
(c. 2700 BCE), their
gods created the world
out of a lifeless sea of
chaos.
They also came to believe that after death, a
person’s soul faced judgement and was then
sent to a place of reward or punishment.
Norse or Viking story
The world was created
by gods from the body
of a giant (c. 500BCE).
The Batak of Sumatra: a sky goddess
came down to the sea with a handful of
earth to live on- Sumatra. An underworld
dragon sometimes rolls around which
causes earthquakes.
(There are many in Sumatra)
• Some Australian aborigines believed that
the first humans were regurgitated by a
great rainbow serpent in the sky.
The Mayans of Central America believed
that the creator gods made humans out of
maize
(the main food of the Mayans).
The Aurora borealis or northern lights
There were stories
about where
animals come from.

Goose barnacles

Barnacle goose
Some examples from medieval Europe
 The life cycle
of the eagle

(These are from medieval bestiaries)

Why do hedgehogs have spines?
Mandrake root
 The creation stories of the
ancient Hebrews
(c. 540-330 BCE)

Depiction of creation story from Martin

Luther’s German translation of the Bible
(1534)
‘Adam and Eve in worthy Paradise’ by Peter Paul Rubens (1617)
Noah's Ark by Simon de Myle (1517)
James Ussher (1650s)

characteristic fossils of different rock layers

An early 19th-century English Bible,
with annotations

• 18th century = 1700s

• 19th century = 1800s
But there are things not mentioned in creation
stories- like fossils. What about them?
The ancient Greeks and Romans.
The Hesione vase, (c. 550 BC)
Cyclops?
Fossil “Devil’s toenail”
(Gryphaea)
Fossil “snake stones”
(Ammonites)
Saint Hilda
Fossil “snake stones”- carved
Ammonites
Fossil “tongue stones”
 Nicolas Steno: shark teeth
compared with “tongue stones”
(1667)
Rock layers or strata
Sediment washing out to sea
 Principles usually attributed to Steno
• Law of original horizontality
• Law of superposition
 Note the explanation
for fossils still in print
in 1731.

From: Rudwick, Scenes

from deep time (1992)
• He noticed that
fossils are not
randomly scattered
as if by a great
flood, but grouped
together, like with
like, as if they were
from the same
habitat.
More living things are uncovered…

Robert Hooke’s
Micrographia (1665)
Engraving of a flea from Hooke’s Micrographia (1665)
“Cells” in bark from Micrographia.
Petrified wood from Micrographia.

“comparing them with

the pores…of several
kinds of wood, I find it
resembles none so
much as those of fir
[trees], to which it is not
much unlike in grain
also”
Hooke, 1665
John Ray (1627-1705)

• There are thousands of

species
• Adaptation proves
divine design

• “the number of true species in

nature is fixed and limited and,
as we may reasonably believe,
constant and unchangeable
from the first creation to the
present day.”

Ray, The wisdom of God manifested in

the works of the creation (1691)
Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)

• Now more than twice the

number of mammals as
Ray knew.

• Species are clear cut &

only come from previous
parents. There are no new
ones.

• There are far too many to

fit in Noah’s ark.
• Linnaeus introduced a binomial
nomenclature, two Latin names:
genus and species.
(example: Homo sapiens)

• 4,400 species of animals and 7,700

species of plants. For him,
classification proved there was
divine design.

• “of all the species originally formed

by the Deity, not one is destroyed”
– that is, there is no extinction.
Table of the Animal Kingdom. (Linnaeus 1735)
 English cyclopaedia (1854).
A branching tree arrangement of
species and genera.
 What is a species?
Javan myna (Acridotheres javanicus)
This?
Common Myna
Common Hill Myna
So we group them all together as Mynas.

The mynas are part of a bigger group, the Birds:

• The classification system today:

(Note that Mammalia is misspelled in this diagram.)

Georges Buffon (1707-1788)
• The epochs of nature (1778)
• Estimated the Earth was 75,000 years old.

• Species in different parts of the world (like

America vs. Europe) are so different they
must have been created separately there…

• Speculated that species can change a little to

fit environments – but not into other species.
Modern mining
James Hutton (1726-1797)
Geological unconformity from Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1795)
 Video clip
• BBC Earth Story The Time Travellers
• Siccar point… (4 mins)

• Hutton’s Theory of the earth (1795)

a cyclical process with “no vestige of a
beginning - no prospect of an end”.
 William Smith (1769-1839)

• Fossils specific to strata

• AND
The order of the beds is the same
everywhere those rocks found
William Smith’s stratigraphic map of England 1815