Topic
Darwin & evolution research, explained
7 open-access darwin & evolution studies, each with a flashcard deck and a quiz.
- Did Darwin’s evolution need habits?
The authors argue habits were central to Darwin’s evolutionary theory and to a wider nineteenth-century view that acquired habits could be inherited — not a Lamarck-only idea.
- Was Darwin's selection a cause or an effect?
Bradley claims Origin does not make natural selection a mindless causal mechanism; it is a higher-order effect of struggle and development.
- Why did Huxley refuse Darwin’s taxonomy?
Before Origin, Darwin told Huxley classification should follow genealogy; Huxley said a theory of species change has no bearing on how we classify, and would sooner die than give that up.
- Why did British zoologists quarrel?
The paper shows that Macleay’s five-member circular quinarianism, Haworth’s dichotomous rival, and Bicheno’s Linnean backlash produced a ‘mean quarrelsome spirit’ Darwin still had to think with.
- Darwin’s sketches: tree, coral, seaweed
Seventeen pre-1859 sketches were personal thinking tools, not public trees; they taught Darwin what the Origin diagram later taught readers.
- Plant cognition after Darwin’s movement book
Darwin analogised the root apex to a brain-like sensitive tip, but denied nerves; later authors stretch that into plant minds.
- de Candolle, geography, and domestication
De Candolle first refused to treat crop variation as a model of wild speciation, then in 1883 adopted Darwin and mapped domestication in space.