Are there any other “evolution”/how animals came to be theories out there outside of evolution, intelligent design and Lamarckism? Just curious.
Lamarckism, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, is a theory of evolution that was disproven when we discovered how genes work and found that changes in somatic tissue don’t alter the genes in your germ-line tissue. Intelligent design–what do you mean by that? You mean supernatural entities of known or unknown types (like, say, Prometheus?) creating life exactly as it exists today? Or aliens? Or something else?
This article might be helpful: History of evolutionary thought - Wikipedia
Lysenkoism, at least kinda. It was, for a long time, the official theory of heritability and genetics in the Soviet Union. From my limited understanding of it, it’s a variation on Lamarckism.
Does ‘‘created with age count’’, i.e. the world was indeed created in 144 hours 6000 year ago, but in such a way as to look of great age. This being GQ, all I will say about that idea is that I have heard it expressed.
I just spent too much time at work searching for this - I know I read in a blog, almost certainly http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/, about a female scientist who denies evolution, but has a completely scientific non-supernatural alternative, unrelated to creationism/ID or Lamarckism. I can’t find the goddamn thing now though.
Does she deny evolution by natural selection, proposing a different mechanism? If not, then it’s hard to imagine how it could be scientific. We know that organisms change over time. That was known before Darwin. Darwin proposed the mechanism.
I don’t recall the mechanism of her alternative, but it may have indeed been contrary to natural selection.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t convinced by it at all, and I’m not saying it was a reasonable theory (and P.Z. Meyers, the author of the blog, ripped it to shreds). I really only recall clearly that she was clearly not proposing creationism (or even creationism in its flimsy ID disguise). That’s what I meant by scientific.
That would be Lynn Margulis. She is famous for having shown that eucaryotic cells originated from a symbiosis between what were originally independent organisms, that now form organelles (specialized structures) within the main cell, such as mitochondria. As I understand it, she does not exactly reject Darwinian evolution by natural selection, and certainly does not reject evolution in teh broad sense, but she thinks that the standard account of it puts much too much stress on competition, and not nearly enough on the role of cooperation and symbiosis between different organisms. It is generally recognized that she showed that this was true of the original evolution of the eukaryotic cell, but most other biologists seem to think she has since attempted to push the general idea much too far and apply it much too widely.
As for alternatives to Darwinism, aside from Lamark and creationism (of which “intelligent design” is a sort of stealth version), before Darwin and Wallace published their ideas about natural selection a number of authors, such as Erasmus Darwin, Robert Chambers, and Herbert Spencer had put forward more or less evolutionary ideas (usually seeing some sort of natural law of progress which they thought applied not just to biology, but to the universe as a whole, and to the development of human society too), but they were pretty vague about the mechanisms involved. Spencer, who was at a fairly early stage of his career when Darwin’s work appeared, became an enthusiastic supporter of Darwin (although, arguably, he misunderstood him in significant ways), and attempted to assimilate Darwin’s theory into his own, presenting it as lending support to, and being a special case of, his own progressivist theory of the evolution of the universe and society. (I believe it was Spencer, rather than Darwin, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to attempt to capture the essence of Darwin’s key idea.)
So far as biological evolution goes, Lamark’s theory is really the only one apart from Darwinian natural selection to offer any real mechanism of how the process might work. It is quite a nice theory, in a way, but it ultimately does not fit the facts. Not only is it inconsistent with what we now know (but neither Lamark nor Darwin knew) about the mechanisms of inheritance, it fails to explain the facts, such as the patterns of geographical distribution of species, that Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) theory was specifically designed to explain. Thus, although he did not reject the possibility that Lamarkin style inheritance of acquired characteristics might sometimes happen, even before heredity was understood, Darwin had very good reasons to think such a mechanism could not be the main engine of evolution.
Of course. I think I had a mental block preventing me from thinking of her based on the “denies evolution” statement.
So, a dude pushes the “competition” side of things and a chick pushes the “cooperation” side of things. How stereotypical! 
That’s almost certainly who I was thinking of, thanks njtt. It was likely this blog entry referenced by P.Z. Meyers that I was remembering:
http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/2011/04/margulis_does_it_again.php
There is a theory for a kind of evolution that runs parallel to Darwinian selection, based on epigenetics, as I understand. There is a means of carrying adaptive information downstream for maybe three or so generations, that responds to conditions, without relying on a differential survival advantage causing genes to proliferate. The example I read about was that if you starve an animal during its youth, and it later recovers and has descendants, their metabolic behavior is adapted somewhat to help cope with food shortages. The effect wears off in a few generations. Darwinian evolution should not accomplish anything in a hypothetical system where every animal creates the same number of progeny, whereas this mechanism is fully functional in such a system.
Incidentally, it is likely that modern conservatives hate evolution so much, and are thus driven towards creationism and fundamentalist Christianity as an alternative, not so much because of anything Darwin himself claimed, but because of the “social Darwinism” through which Spencer and others tried to link Dawinism (largely illegitimately, and certainly without Darwin’s support) to what then passed for progressivist politics. Of course, conservatives who are dumb enough to be creationists are also too dumb to know this.
Through the irony of history, from a modern perspective Spencer looks more like a hard right libertarian than a left-wing “progressive”. Nevertheless, he was very anti-conservative in the sense that he very much believed in change (and progress) through Darwinian/capitalist competition.
I think the Darwinian natural selection mechanism can accommodate epigenetic inheritance well enough. Epigenetics is a challenge to (or, more accurately, a modification of) the standard neo-Mendelian model of heredity, and, since the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the early 20th century, Darwinism and Mendelian inheritance have become strongly associated. However, that does not mean that if you modify your model of inheritance a bit to accommodate epigenetic mechanisms then Darwinian mechanisms are thereby challenged. Darwin himself, after all, had no clue how inheritance works, he just knew (as people had known for millennia) that it does.
To return to the OP’s question, the Greek presocratic philosopher Anaximander (one of history’s greatest minds, IMHO) held that “animals came to be” through spontaneous generation out the muck on the seashore. He observed that tiny bugs of various sorts often come out of this muck (their eggs, of course, are too small to see without a microscope) and reasoned that it was possible that larger animals might also emerge from it on rare occasions, so that, for instance the first horses or lions or whatever may have come out of it at some indefinite time in the past.
However, he held that human beings could not have emerged directly from the muck, because, unlike the newborns of most species, human newborns are too helpless to survive without a parent to take care of them. Thus he thought that humans must have developed from some other sort of creature probably, he thought, some sort of fish). Because of this, Anaximander has sometimes been held up as the very first evolutionary theorist.
The theory of spontaneous generation of living animals from non-living muck lasted for a very long time, and was not decisively refuted until the work of Louis Pasteur in the 19th century. In a way it has even been revived since then in modern theories of abiogenesis, the emergence of the first life forms from the “chemical soup” of the ancient Earth.
OK, I will shut up now.
That’s the Omphalos hypothesis.
**Wikipedia on Omphalos hypothesis:
So…This means Harold Camping was right!:eek:
The person that explained it to me didn’t call it the Omphalos hypothesis.
[Moderator Note]
Let’s avoid political commentary of this kind in GQ. No warning issued.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Let’s get some facts straight. First, the idea of evolution was in the air long before (Charles) Darwin. A most notable advocate was Erasmus Darwin, his grandfather. Darwin’s (as well as Wallace’s) new idea was natural selection (and I don’t think he called survival of the fittest, which is misleading anyway, since it is reproductive success). Darwin actually called it descent with modification, which is quite descriptive, even if it lacks the zing of natural selection. Second, it is not incompatible with Lamarckianism. Darwin had no idea of what the mechanism was and he probably thought that variation was continuous rather than discrete. When a trait (such as skin or hair color) depends on many genes, it does appear to be continuous. It was Mendel who carried out the crucial experiments that suggested genes. It was not until the 1940s that it was even known that the chromosomes were where the genes were. I believe a man named Avery demonstrated that.
Then came Watson and Crick and the double helix. There was a now-discarded idea of one gene/one protein. Then “junk” (non-coding) DNA was discovered and thought to be…junk. It isn’t. Then epigenetic factors, including genes that were active only if they came from the mother, others only from the father. The sometimes fierce battle in the womb fought by such genes that can result in complications–occasionally quite serious–such as pre-eclampsia and maternal diabetes. Wherever they look, it seems to get more complicated.
But it all fits comfortably within the Darwinian concepts. A good friend of mine observed once that Darwinism didn’t make atheism necessary, but it did make it possible. Before that, no one could imagine any other answer than god(s) to the question how did we get here. It is easy to see why organized religions have problems with it.