Discovering Life's Story: The Evolution of an Idea
192
Discovering Life's Story: The Evolution of an Idea
192Hardcover
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Overview
Can species change? Or go extinct? In the eighteenth century, most people answer no to both questions. But in the century that follows, that certainty gets challenged as some people in Europe question the common belief that all creatures are the same as they’ve been since life’s creation. The Evolution of an Idea, the second volume of Discovering Life’s Story, opens with the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, who attempts to create an organizing system for the myriad forms of life on earth. It continues into the late 1800s, when two Englishmen—Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace—each develop their own version of a startling new theory of how life-forms change over time. This evolutionary idea will alter the understanding of our place in the great web of life on earth. In this remarkable volume, author Joy Hakim continues charting the path of human discovery and shows how groundbreaking thinkers began to unlock the biological secrets of our own existence.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781536222944 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Candlewick Press |
| Publication date: | 05/07/2024 |
| Series: | Discovering Life's Story |
| Pages: | 192 |
| Sales rank: | 344,286 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.80(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Age Range: | 14 - 17 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
An Age of Enlightenment and Evolution
Starting in 1751, a Frenchman named Denis Diderot publishes a sprawling series of books attempting to detail all the world’s scientific, artistic, and technological knowledge. He titles the series the Encyclopedia and says the books, which he cowrites with other authors, are intended to change the way people think.
For Diderot, writing has been dangerous. He was imprisoned by French authorities for previous works. But Diderot is convinced of the power of words based on informed research; he is determined to use them to advance knowledge, no matter what kings or clergy think. “All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings,” he writes.
Also in 1751, a Swedish naturalist named Carl Linnaeus says that “in natural science the elements of truth ought to be confirmed by observation.” Those words help give birth to a new age of organized thinking.
This period of time will be known as the Enlightenment (or sometimes the Age of Reason). It began in the late seventeenth century and will continue through the eighteenth. In this age, experiments and observations are understood as essential if science is to advance beyond hypothesis. And that’s not all; the very ways people perceive the world around them will be reconsidered.
“Dare to Know!”
That credo is used by Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, to sum up the Enlightenment. Kant writes that enlightenment for an individual means learning to think for oneself. It means growing beyond an immaturity whose “cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.” He tells his readers to “have courage to use your own understanding!” Bear in mind that this admonition comes at a time when many of his fellow Europeans turn to the church or the monarch for their beliefs.
While this invigorated thinking is taking hold, there is a new global awareness, a new sharing of ideas, and increased travel among the continents. In cities around the world, thinkers are building on Enlightenment ideas in different ways and then sharing those ideas.
News from Asia floods back to Europe from missionaries and traders. According to a modern German historian, Jürgen Osterhammel, “Around the mid-eighteenth century, the public in France or Germany was better informed about China than about many countries on Europe’s periphery.”
A British philosopher, John Locke, has ideas that help lay the groundwork for democratic revolutions in America and France. Locke says that “all men by nature are equal” and have a right to their own life, liberty, and property. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher, says, “Man was born free; and everywhere he is in chains.”
Such thinking inspires Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and others to seek independence for the British colonies in North America and forge what will become a new and rebellious nation.
Theirs are revolutionary ideas, but note the use of the words man and men when there is talk of rights. This is not an age of equal opportunity for women, although a few do make their voices heard. In France, a butcher’s daughter, Olympe de Gouges, becomes a playwright. In 1791, she writes the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen. De Gouges has patterned her work after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the [Male] Citizen, written by the Marquis de Lafayette and others and adopted by France’s National Constituent Assembly in 1789.
De Gouges makes her feelings clear in her own declaration: Women have a right to citizenship that is equal to men’s, she says. At a time when men control their wives’ property, she says that in marriage, men and women should share property. Then she goes further in other published work; a fierce abolitionist, she writes a play attacking slavery. She is horrified that Europeans are selling people “like cows at market,” she will write.
De Gouges’s ideas may seem like common sense today, but in the eighteenth century, they are dangerous. Like many people who get involved in politics and speak their mind during the French Revolution, she eventually falls out of favor and is tried for treason and executed.
Ideas about natural rights as embodied in the American and French Revolutions spark movements elsewhere. In their own revolution, for instance, fought from 1791 to 1804, enslaved people in the French colony of Saint Domingue revolt and reclaim their country for themselves. The new sovereign nation is named Haiti. Although this revolution is led by people of color and ends slavery in the colony, this broader definition of who is endowed with natural rights is not adopted in either America or France. And even in Haiti, as a price for ensuring peace, the government will be saddled for generations with debts to those who held people in bondage.
During these times of political upheavals, there is also revolution afoot in science.
For much of European history, there has been a clear order and hierarchy of beings, with God at the top. The prevailing view is that there have been no major changes in life since humans were created. Most people believe life is controlled by divine forces beyond human understanding. Evolution and extinction have no place in this model.
But cracks have appeared in this foundational knowledge. If each animal is perfectly made to suit its environment, why do similar environments hold dramatically different creatures? Why has Mary Anning, the British Enlightenment fossil hunter, found seaside bones so large that they could belong to no living species? Is it possible that some life-forms have gone extinct? Almost no one believes that (although it is true), but some geological findings, uncovered in layers of ancient rock, seem to have been left behind by creatures no longer found on Earth.
New ideas about how life changes over time battle against the commonly held belief that all species are as they have been since creation. This leads to fierce differences of opinion. A French professor, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, comes up with a radical idea. He says that animals do change, that they adjust to their environment, acquire new traits, and that this change can eventually lead to new species. Lamarck’s scientific rival, Baron Georges Cuvier, studies the fossil record and claims that life sometimes changes abruptly in response to catastrophic events such as earthquakes but not gradually, as Lamarck believes. This becomes a big debate among those who think scientifically, a group that is coming to include more and more people.
Scientific exploration has become a popular pastime for the well-heeled and the intellectually curious, men and women alike. Now many people are searching for clues as to how life works. They hike up mountains and along streams. Some study the heavens, trying to figure out our place in the universe. Others study animals, shells, and fossils, often documenting what they discover.
This age of popular scientific exploration sets the stage for two Englishmen, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who will each develop a new and startling idea about life based on the concept that life-forms have changed, or evolved, and continue to do so. Some will recognize the importance of this joint discovery; many will be dismayed. Few will understand its far-reaching consequences. Given time, the evolutionary idea―that life-forms change over time―will shake the foundations of established thinking. It will transform human understanding of our place in the universe.