Science Flashcards
(55 cards)
Who was Charles Darwin
1809-1882 He is famous for his work on the theory of evolution. His book On the Origin of Species (1859) did two things. First, it provided a great deal of evidence that evolution has taken place. Second, it proposed a theory to explain how evolution works. That theory is natural selection.[3] Evolution by natural selection is the key to understanding biology, and the diversity of life on Earth.
Where did Darwin attend uni
Darwin’s father, Robert Darwin, was a doctor and hoped his son would study medicine. Charles’s older brother had been sent to Edinburgh University, to learn the advanced European medical theories that the English universities still didn’t teach, and in 1825, young Charles – just sixteen years old – was sent to join him.
Why did Darwin quit Edinburgh
Charles did not take to medical study: the site of operations being performed without anaesthetic made him sick and he soon quit his studies.
Why did he go to Cambridge
Darwin’s father wanted him to study theology and he thought about it and decided he ‘liked the thought of being a country clergyman’, so he gave up all pretence of medical study and came to Cambridge, to take a BA degree as the necessary preliminary to becoming an Anglican priest.
Describe the Beagle and how Darwin got a place on it
Thanks to Henslow, Darwin got the chance to go on the Beagle, a British navy surveying ship. The collections he made during its five-year mission allowed Darwin to build a career as a man of science. Its captain Robert FitzRoy was worried that he might go crazy; a few years earlier his uncle, Viscount Castlereagh, had slit his throat in a fit of depression. Like many Victorians, FitzRoy believed that such mental instability was inherited and he might be prone to it himself. His worries were exacerbated by the fact that he was about to go off on a long voyage of exploration, preparing maps for the Admiralty. In the British navy at this time, the captain kept order mainly by terrorising his junior officers and men; he had to remain aloof and superior. On long voyages this isolation led to loneliness and the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, had gone mad and shot himself off the South American coast. FitzRoy decided that it was essential to his sanity to have a companion on board, a gentleman who would share his dinners and keep him company; that was how Darwin got the position – because he was a gentleman, not because he was a naturalist.
What did the Beagle lead to for Darwin
However, Darwin was more interested in geology at this stage of his career and spent long periods of the voyage ashore, making geological surveys and collecting specimens of every sort.
How did Thomas Malthus influence Charles Darwin?
Charles Darwin was influenced by many writers, scholars, philosophers, and friends. One of his influences was Thomas Robert Malthus, a late-eighteenth century economist. Malthus wrote “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798), which Darwin read and was inspired by. The central theme of Malthus’ work was that population growth would always overpower food supply growth, creating perpetual states of hunger, disease, and struggle. The natural, ever-present struggle for survival caught the attention of Darwin, and he extended Malthus’ principle to the evolutionary scheme.
Darwin considered that some of the competitors in Malthus’ perpetual struggle would be better equipped to survive. Those that were less able would die out, leaving only those with the more desirable traits. Through his research, Darwin concluded that this ongoing struggle between those more and less fit to survive would produce a never-ending progression of changes in the organism. In its simplest form, this is evolution through natural selection.
Darwin had many other sources from which he developed his theory. Yet, if evolution was the machine, and natural selection was the engine, then Malthus’ perpetual struggle for resources was the fuel. Prior to contemplating “Population,” Darwin believed that populations grew until they were aligned with existing resources, and then stabilized. Thomas Malthus’ work helped inspire Darwin to refine natural selection by stating a reason for meaningful competition between members of the same species.
Not surprisingly, Malthus, an ordained minister, believed that hunger and disease were aspects of life implemented by God to stop populations from exploding. Lacking these “positive checks” (as he called them), the world would quickly be overcrowded. He saw the competitive nature of life as a divine means to inspire men to work. Malthus disagreed with many of the more optimistic philosophers of the day who felt that any problem of humankind could be solved through social engineering. Malthus would probably be surprised to see how his essay became central to the type of naturalistic philosophy he disliked. - See more at: http://www.allaboutscience.org/thomas-malthus-faq.htm#sthash.7FSQorP5.dpuf
Darwin and pigeons
Pigeon keeping was a popular hobby in Victorian Britain and Darwin became increasingly interested in it after his return from the Beagle. He joined both and working- and respectable middle-class pigeon keeping societies (like the one pictured) to learn how breeders created new varieties.
Darwins belief of species of pigeoons
A selection of Victorian “fancy” pigeons: Darwin argued that if these were shown to an ornithologist who was told they were wild birds, they would undoubtedly be classified as separate species, if no separate genera (pl. of genus), yet we know that all these varieties had been created by human breeders very recently, simply by selecting traits in wild pigeons that they found attractive. He argued that if humans could do so much in a short space of time, nature could do much more, given the hundreds of millions of years she had at her disposal
Who was William Paley
1743-1805 William Paley was an English clergyman, Christian apologist, philosopher, and utilitarian. He is best known for his natural theology exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, which made use of the watchmaker analogy.
why did Darwin delay his publishing of The Origin of Species
Although Darwin had largely completed his theory by the late 1830s, it was not published until 1859. It seems likely that the controversial religious and political implications of his theory made Darwin delay, worried by the hostile reaction he expected
What was the crisis of faith?
The Crisis of Faith refers to an event in the Victorian era in which much of Europe’s middle class begins to doubt what is written in the book of Genesis as a reliable source in accordance of how the universe was created (Flynn). An important work to consider is written in 1802 by William Paley called Natural Theology: Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature. Paley writes in the belief that God is the sole creator of the universe and that all existing species were created by God perfectly for his intended universal balance. Needless to say, this ideology denounces the possibility of evolution which would be suggested later by Charles Darwin in his work entitled On the Origin of Species in 1859 (Fyfe, van Wyhe).
What is progressive creationism
Progressive creationism (see for comparison intelligent design) is the belief that God created new forms of life gradually over a period of hundreds of millions of years. As a form of old earth creationism, it accepts mainstream geological and cosmological estimates for the age of the Earth, some tenets of biology such as microevolution as well as archaeology to make its case. In this view creation occurred in rapid bursts in which all “kinds” of plants and animals appear in stages lasting millions of years. The bursts are followed by periods of stasis or equilibrium to accommodate new arrivals. These bursts represent instances of God creating new types of organisms by divine intervention
Who was Charles lyell
FRS (14 November 1797 – 22 February 1875) was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton’s concepts of uniformitarianism—the idea that the Earth was shaped by the same processes still in operation today. Principles of Geology also challenged theories popularized by Georges Cuvier, which were the most accepted and circulated ideas about geology in England at the time.[1]
What was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is an 1844 work of speculative natural history and philosophy by Robert Chambers. Published anonymously in England, it brought together various ideas of stellar evolution with the progressive transmutation of species in an accessible narrative which tied together numerous scientific theories of the age.
Vestiges was initially well received by polite Victorian society and became an international bestseller, but its unorthodox themes contradicted the natural theology fashionable at the time and were reviled by clergymen – and subsequently by scientists who readily found fault with its amateurish deficiencies. The ideas in the book were favoured by Radicals, but its presentation remained popular with a much wider public. Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria in 1845. Vestiges caused a shift in popular opinion which – Charles Darwin believed – prepared the public mind for the scientific theories of evolution by natural selection which followed from the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859.
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What does John Hedley Brooke argue in visions of the past why Darwin delayed publication
Darwin had a fear of persecution hence the dealy in publishing on the origin of species.
Who was David Strauss
27 January 1808 – 8 February 1874) was a German liberal protestant theologian and writer. He scandalized Christian Europe with his portrayal of the “historical Jesus”, whose divine nature he denied. His work was connected to the Tübingen School, which revolutionized study of the New Testament, early Christianity, and ancient religions. Strauss was a pioneer in the historical investigation of Jesus.
What was the life of jesus about?
Strauss, by analysing the Bible in terms of self-coherence and paying attention to numerous contradictions, rejected the actuality of the stories as “happenings” and read them solely on a mythic level. Moving from miracle to miracle, he viewed all as the product of the early church’s use of Jewish ideas about what the Messiah would be like, in order to express the conviction that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. With time the book created a new epoch in the textual and historical treatment of the rise of Christianity.
Who was John Ray?
John Ray (29 November 1627 – 17 January 1705) was an English naturalist, widely regarded as one of the earliest of the English parson-naturalists.[1] Until 1670, he wrote his name as John Wray. From then on, he used ‘Ray’, after “having ascertained that such had been the practice of his family before him”.[2]
He published important works on botany, zoology, and natural theology. His classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum, was an important step towards modern taxonomy. Ray rejected the system of dichotomous division by which species were classified according to a pre-conceived, either/or type system, and instead classified plants according to similarities and differences that emerged from observation. Thus he advanced scientific empiricism against the deductive rationalism of the scholastics. He was the first to give a biological definition of the term species.[3]
What was the Wisdom of God in 1691
In the 1690s, Ray published three volumes on religion—the most popular being The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691), “an essay in natural religion that called on the full range of his biological learning”.[11] In this volume, he moved on from the naming and cataloguing of species like his successor Carl Linnaeus. Instead, Ray considered species’ lives and how nature worked as a whole. This work largely epitomized Natural Theology during his time.[12]
Who was Thomas Burnet
1635? – 27 September 1715[1][2]) was an English theologian and writer on cosmogony. He tried to give a philosophical explanation of the bible
Why was geology important
Vital to search for raw materials such as coal for industrialisation
What was the geological survey
The Geological Survey was founded in 1835 as the Ordnance Geological Survey, under Henry De la Beche. This was the world’s first national geological survey. It remained a branch of the Ordnance Survey for many years. In 1965, it was merged with the Geological Museum and Overseas Geological Surveys, under the name of “Institute of Geological Sciences”. On 1 January 1984, the institute was renamed the British Geological Survey (and often referred to as the BGS), a name still carried today.
Geology, science and ind rev
Geology was the big science of the early-nineteenth century, partly because the boom in mining that fuelled industrial revolution which helped create a great interest in the science that would tell people where to dig for more coal, iron and other minerals. The first paid jobs for men of science were at the Geological Survey whose geologists were mainly engaged in mapping Britain’s mineral wealth. Image: a Government geologist at work, 1830s.
