Week1
Prompt:
Ideas about how the universe is ordered can be highly compelling. Using examples and concepts from the history of science, discuss how specific historical figures have produced evidence and arguments to challenge prevailing ideas about order, how they made their evidence compete with those ideas, and what shaped their acceptance or rejection in specific contexts.
Response: (330 words)
Over time, people’s understanding of the universe has continued to change. Throughout history, whenever new theories and ideas have been born, they have led the way towards a revolution and a major shift in the understanding of the universe. Charles Darwin, for example, came up with the theory of evolution, and Charles’s theory of evolution was at odds with the ideas of the people of the time and theirs. It was the Middle Ages when religious beliefs were prevalent and people generally believed that God the Creator created everything (creationism) and did not believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin found evidence of this on Galapagos island and realised that animals on different islands were different and that animals evolved organs that were beneficial to them in order to adapt to their environments. (Bowler, Peter J, 2020, 130-140) Darwin’s discovery of the law of natural selection through the breeds of animals bred by humans, he noticed that even in artificially bred populations there were differences in each individual. (Bowler, Peter J, 2020, 130-140) Breeders produce new breeds by selecting individuals with very few characteristics for breeding. It came to relate this process to the mechanism of selection in nature, which is believed to direct the evolution of species by selecting those individuals best suited to their environment. In summary all the signs and evidence above prevented Darwin from accepting the discovery as a creation of God. But there were many people at the time who did not believe in it, such as Louis Agassiz who advocated the invariance of species and polycentric creation and who insisted that all living things were created by God. Socialist supporters of the time also remained hostile to Darwin’s theory of evolution, believing that Darwin’s struggle for survival (that only strong animals could survive under) was linked to capitalism. In the face of political and opposing pressures, Darwin published the Origin of Species in 1859, which had a huge impact on the history of science.
Reference:
Bowler, P. J. & Morus, I. R. (2020) Making modern science : a historical survey / Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus. Second edition.
Howard, Jonathan. (1982) Darwin / Jonathan Howard. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
