wrote:

> er... I better start by saying that this is intended as a genuine question
> and NOT as a flame-bait
> 
> I'm not a professional biologist, let alone specialist on evolution
> 
> Speaking as a layman - I am convinced that evolution did *take* place,
> and, as a layman, I had always regarded Charles Darwin himself
> as *very* important to the development of a serious theory of evolution...
> 
> BUT
> 
> I've recently been speaking with a couple of people who
> *have* academically specialised in evolution
> 
> They allege that Darwin was - and is - greatly over-rated
> 
> Now bear in mind that these were biologists who
> believed that evolution *had* taken place - they *weren't*
> "Creationists" or anything similar
> 
> but they claim that Darwin's contribution was "greatly over-rated"
> and "not worth mentioning"
> 
> My attempts to ask just *why* Darwin was "over-rated"
> were brushed aside with comments to the effect that:
> as I didn't have a phD in evolution, I would not understand
> 
> 
> okay, now I'm confused
> 
> can anyone offer any help ???

There are two main approaches to the history of science in the past -
one is the Great Man Theory - only these isolated geniuses could have
made this Major Breakthrough on which a science or program is founded.
The other is the Zeitgeist Theory, that the idea was "in the air" and
that it didn't really matter what individual found it first.

A more realistic approach to the history of science mixes the two.
Darwin built on the work of many other people, and aspects of his
overall theory were certainly being discussed prior to his own
publication. One thing that was "in the air" was natural selection, in
part because Adam Smith had introduced the "hidden hand" into economics
and most folk were talking about economics in the time. As Gould has
said, it is not remarkable that natural selection was anticipated -
nearly all people knew of it. But Darwin was the first, followed by
Wallace, to suggest that selection *caused* evolution. Prior to that
time, it was thought that selection would retard change by weeding out
the variation that diverged from the "best type".

Transmutation of species was in the air - it had been mooted in the
prior century as an outgrowth of the Great Chain of Being philosophy of
the late middle ages. But the transmutationism before Darwin was made on
an analogy between individual development (the "evolutio" of evolution,
etymologically) and change in the large (itself an idea that goes back
to Plato, who saw macrocosms in microcosms and vice versa).

Common descent had been fragmentarily proposed - Lamarck had suggested
it partially. But Darwin was the first to put it clearly as an
explanation of *all* species, genera and other taxonomic groups.

Overall, Darwin was necessary for the exact form of modern evolutionary
theory, because only he was in a position to combine all the relevant
elements, and his genius was that he could do it so well that apart from
his ideas on heredity and his early view that *all* species were caused
by selection, little of his views have had to be abandoned entirely
since. Had it been Wallace, for example, not Darwin (had Chas died in
the 1850s, for example) then geographical speciation might have been
rejected for a long time - Darwin was more pluralistic than Wallace.

I call this view of history the Contingency Theory - some things are
likely to occur eventually, but how they do it is a matter of contingent
implementation. Suppose von Baer had become a transmutationist in the
1850s - what differences would that have caused? I think that we would
eventually have sorted it out, but it might have taken a lot less or
more tiem to do it. While science is a self-correcting process, wrong,
incomplete or biased ideas can persist in it for a very long time. We
are fortunate it was Darwin, in my view, because he was in truth a
genius at collating large amounts of data into syntheses of hypotheses.
-- 
John Wilkins
"Listen to your heart, not the voices in your head" - Marge Simpson
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