WI: Evolution discovered earlier?

I'm surprised that it took until the 19th century to fully formulate the idea of evolution - its discovery didn't require any advanced technology or mathematics. When is the earliest it could be fully realized and what are the ramifications?
 
Get Malthusian thought out quicker and that will help. Both Darwin and Wallace got inspiration from that.
 
Evolution as a concept could have been thought of earlier, but without an understanding and eventual proof of Mendelian genetics it would remain just a non-scientific philosophy.
 
I was considering this the other day. One that springs to mind for me are much earlier ideas about eugenics and innate racial superiority.

Yea I'm not so sure that earlier evolutionary theory is a good thing. Racism and slavery now find that they have firm scientific footing within Victorian era societies. Things like cranial size and shape were used to "prove" that other races were inferior, evolutionary theory just gives those ideas more weight.
 
Evolution as a concept could have been thought of earlier, but without an understanding and eventual proof of Mendelian genetics it would remain just a non-scientific philosophy.

Darwin and Wallace amassed a tremendous weight of scientific evidence in favor of the existence of evolution long before Mendelian genetics was at all known or suspected to be important. They may not have been able to identify the mechanism by which trait inheritance occurred, but that in no way makes their theory unscientific, it merely means that they were missing part of it.
 
Evolution as a concept could have been thought of earlier, but without an understanding and eventual proof of Mendelian genetics it would remain just a non-scientific philosophy.

Definitely get the works of Mendel out there earlier- that awesome stuff was "lost" for a few decades after publication. Even if that's not the case in actuality, and the significance of it was lost until the 20th Century, get the significance realized much earlier. Alternatively, have someone else make Mendel's discoveries. I can't suggest specific people right now, (or really at all), but that might prove ahem, fruitful (haha. Plant joke, because Mendel's work with peas)
 
Darwin and Wallace amassed a tremendous weight of scientific evidence in favor of the existence of evolution long before Mendelian genetics was at all known or suspected to be important. They may not have been able to identify the mechanism by which trait inheritance occurred, but that in no way makes their theory unscientific, it merely means that they were missing part of it.

Indeed. What was important was less the philosophical grounding of the idea which goes back to Anaximander of Miletus
(c. 610 – 546 BC) but finding enough material to proof the concept. This was the big difference between Erasmus Darwin (who did a very good first draft of the theory of evolution) and his grandson Charles Darwin.

So who was the earliest likly source of a systematic study ?

I would say it was Shen Kuo. Here is what wiki says about him:
It was Shen Kuo who formulated a hypothesis about the process of land formation (geomorphology) based upon several observations as evidence. This included his observation of fossil shells in a geological stratum of a mountain hundreds of miles from the ocean. He inferred that the land was reshaped and formed by erosion of the mountains, uplift, and the deposition of silt, after observing strange natural erosions of the Taihang Mountains and the Yandang Mountain near Wenzhou. He hypothesized that, with the inundation of silt, the land of the continent must have been formed over an enormous span of time.While visiting the Taihang Mountains in 1074, Shen Kuo noticed strata of bivalve shells and ovoid rocks in a horizontal-running span through a cliff like a large belt.Shen proposed that the cliff was once the location of an ancient seashore that by his time had shifted hundreds of miles east.Shen wrote that in the Zhiping reign period (1064–1067) a man of Zezhou unearthed an object in his garden that looked like a serpent or dragon, and after examining it, concluded the dead animal had apparently turned to "stone".The magistrate of Jincheng, Zheng Boshun, examined the creature as well, and noted the same scale-like markings that were seen on other marine animals.Shen Kuo likened this to the "stone crabs" found in China.


Shen also wrote that since petrified bamboos were found underground in a climatic area where they had never been known to be grown, the climate there must have shifted geographically over time Around the year 1080, Shen Kuo noted that a landslide on the bank of a large river near Yanzhou (modern Yan'an) had revealed an open space several dozens of feet under the ground once the bank collapsed.This underground space contained hundreds of petrified bamboos still intact with roots and trunks, "all turned to stone" as Shen Kuo wrote.Shen Kuo noted that bamboos do not grow in Yanzhou, located in northern China, and he was puzzled during which previous dynasty the bamboos could have grown. Considering that damp and gloomy low places provide suitable conditions for the growth of bamboo, Shen deduced that the climate of Yanzhou must have fit that description in very ancient times. Although this would have intrigued many of his readers, the study of paleoclimatology in medieval China never developed into an established discipline.
Now to spread his idea I used the following development in my China timeline:


....The fossils were impressed into lithographic limestone, which happened to have some very useful properties. Lithographic originally used an image drawn with oil, fat, or wax onto the surface of a smooth, level lithographic limestone plate.

The stone was treated with a mixture of acid and other stuff, etching the portions of the stone which were not protected by the grease-based image. When the stone was subsequently moistened, these etched areas retained water; an oil-based ink could then be applied and would be repelled by the water, sticking only to the original drawing. The ink would finally be transferred to a blank paper sheet, producing a printed page. Yin Jong discovered this while trying to "print" his fossils collection on paper to send them to other enthusiasts and vice versa.
 
Darwin and Wallace amassed a tremendous weight of scientific evidence in favor of the existence of evolution long before Mendelian genetics was at all known or suspected to be important. They may not have been able to identify the mechanism by which trait inheritance occurred, but that in no way makes their theory unscientific, it merely means that they were missing part of it.

A parallel can be made with continental drift. The concept had been around since the 16th Century and there was very obvious physical evidence for it, but, despite a large amount of physical "scientific" evidence supporting Wegener's theory it was not widely accepted by geologists until the 1960's when the mechanism by which the continents moved was finally discovered - in effect it was not seen as a valid scientific theory by most geologists despite its superficial ability to "explain" the shape of continental masses. I would argue this is exactly the case with biological evolution. Darwin, Wallace, and for that matter Lamarck, all came up with neat ideas that appeared to explain the physical similarities and differences among species, but until the actual Mendelian mechanisms were discovered and proven, evolution would have remained just a neat idea searching for an explanation of how exactly it worked.
 
I'm surprised that it took until the 19th century to fully formulate the idea of evolution - its discovery didn't require any advanced technology or mathematics. When is the earliest it could be fully realized and what are the ramifications?

Good point. I suppose it should have been possible to discover that idea ever since it was possible to travel between different areas and collect specimens of animals. This means it might have been possible as far back as the ancient world.
 
I would argue this is exactly the case with biological evolution. Darwin, Wallace, and for that matter Lamarck, all came up with neat ideas that appeared to explain the physical similarities and differences among species, but until the actual Mendelian mechanisms were discovered and proven, evolution would have remained just a neat idea searching for an explanation of how exactly it worked.

No, it would not. The difference with continental drift is that while you cannot witness continents drifting (not without modern tools that allow you to measure very small changes), you can observe the effects of selection on populations in a relatively short period of time, even without having the information needed to formulate an accurate theory of heredity. Which is exactly what Wallace and Darwin did, so that although no one had a clear idea of how traits were inherited and selected until the early 20th century, Darwin and Wallace's work proved that there was some mechanism that did so, and within a few decades--reasonably average, for new theories--it was widely accepted in the scientific community as a theory.

Incidentally, if lacking a clear mechanism disqualifies an idea from being a scientific theory, then a wide swath of important scientific theories, notably Newtonian gravitation, would also be disqualified. Neither Newton himself nor anyone else could come up with an adequate explanation for why, to all appearances, gravitational forces were transmitted instantly between widely separated bodies, with no apparent material contact, and in fact Newton considered this one of the greatest shortcomings of his theory. With no clear mechanism for how it functioned, Newtonian gravitation should, according to you, have been treated as a mere philosophical concept, but in fact it is a prototypical scientific theory.
 
No, it would not. The difference with continental drift is that while you cannot witness continents drifting (not without modern tools that allow you to measure very small changes), you can observe the effects of selection on populations in a relatively short period of time, even without having the information needed to formulate an accurate theory of heredity.

This is such a tangential and inconsequential disagreement that I hesitate to continue. But here goes. Darwin's opus is titled "Origin of the Species". One cannot witness speciation any more easily that one can watch the continents move. Darwinian (or Neo-Darwinian) evolution has been proven because all sorts of independent evidence from geology, biology, genetics, paleontology, and other fields all point to the fact that evolution must have occurred and that the best explanation for this is some form of natural selection. I do consider evolution a "proven" scientific theory, but to be frank, as far as I know, even with human attempts over the last 10,000 years to selectively breed animals and plants, the evolution truly new species has not been observed.
 
One thing you'd need first is development in geology- evolution needs "Deep Time".

No Sedgwick, no Darwin.
 
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