Charles Darwin is usually credited with the establishment of a branched evolutionary "Tree of Life". 1850 (Charles Bonnet, Jean Lamarck and others). Despite these insights, the Bible-based concept of the so-called "ladder of life" or Scala Naturae, i.e., the idea that all living beings can be viewed as representing various degrees of "perfection", with humans at the very top of this biological hierarchy, was popular among naturalists until ca. However, the evolution of phenotypic features is not predictable, and biologists no longer use terms such as "primitive" or "perfect organisms".
3500 million year long evolutionary history. He acquired it sometime in the 1870s, having lost the volume he originally read in New Zealand.All living beings on Earth, from bacteria to humans, are connected through descent from common ancestors and represent the summation of their corresponding, ca. This first edition of 1859, now in the Butler Collection, came from Butler’s own library.
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When Butler began his own theorizing on evolution, he came to disagree profoundly with the argument put forward in the Origin of Species, yet he still asserted Darwin’s importance in advancing scientific and intellectual understanding: ‘However we may differ from him in detail, the present general acceptance of evolution must remain as his work, and a more valuable work can hardly be imagined.’
In 1865 Butler wrote to Darwin, enclosing a copy of his recently published pamphlet, The Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists, critically examined, and praising Darwin’s work: ‘I always delighted in your origin of species as soon as I saw it out in N.Z-not as knowing anything whatsoever of natural history, but it enters into so many deeply interesting questions, or rather it suggests so many that it thoroughly fascinated me.’ Being an occasional contributor to the Christchurch Press, Butler published two ‘philosophical dialogues’ defending Darwin’s idea against its general objectors.
There, freed from his father’s religious influence, and with lots of time for reading and reflection, Butler studied Darwin’s Origin of Species and was immediately convinced of the truth of evolution. In September 1859, two months before the publication of Charles Darwin’s book, Samuel Butler had set off for New Zealand.
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