What were the precursors and alternatives to the theory of evolution?

What were the precursors and alternatives to the theory of evolution? You know how the Steady-State Theory and the Big Bang Theory were competing theories in astronomy, and how the ether theory (in which scientists believed that light travelled in a medium like water or sound) was an alternative theory to the theory of special relativity? Well, were there any precursors and alternatives to the theory of evolution, and what were they? Are there still supporters for those theories in the 21st century, or have the theories all lost support when evidence for evolution grows?

(Yes, I know there is a Wikipedia article on this exact issue. But I am going to ask it here anyway, because I enjoy reading members’ responses. It’s amusing. Keep me entertained.)

then, enjoy.

Lamarckism - the idea that acquired characteristics would be inherited by tyhe next generation.

Possibly the best answer is - evolution. The idea that different creatures shared a common ancestor predated Chrales Darwin’s and The Origin of Species. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, wrote about different species sharing a common ancestor in his Zoonomia. What Charles achieved was to explain the mechanism of evolution.

Lamarckism was another theory that predated Charles’ work, but I don’t think it, or any other theory, was widely accepted.

Magic

One assumes by “evolution” you mean Darwinian evolution. Larmarkinism is also evolution. Species change and evolve. The difference is the manner and forces by which they change. Not that they evolve or not. The only precursor to evolution is non-evolution. Which means, for all intents, creationism, whether intelligent or miraculous or whatever.

Remember, Darwin’s Theory was that evolution was achieved through the process of natural Selection. That all living things are similar in a basic manner that indicates a type of family relationship has been obvious for a long time, much as the fact that stars exist is obvious.
The theory part is the attempt to envision a model and process that explains how the world became as we observe it.

Though, Darwin’s theory of evolution seems to be more supported than Larmarkinism. As far as I know, Larmark is briefly mentioned in Biology textbooks to discuss the origin for Darwin’s theory. So, somehow in history, this guy lost his importance.

Well, yes. Mostly because alterations in a lineage through the differential reproductive success of innately varied individuals in a population in competition for resources fits what we understand of genetics better than the inheritance of characteristics acquired through conscious effort during an individual’s life.

Mostly because he was wrong. Lamarck thought that species evolved in response to their environment. Thus if a giraffe kept stretching his neck to reach a tall tree, his offspring will have longer necks.

As Isaac Asimov pointed out, it was already disproved before he postulated it: Jewish men had been circumcised for centuries, yet Jewish boys are born uncircumcised.

Once people learned about genetics, it was abandoned.

Creationism. Not sure, but there still may be some people out there who believe that one.

Seems?

Somehow? How, is by application of the scientific method.

But, as we are now finding out, Lamarck wasn’t 100% wrong (epigenetics), just 99.999999%.

Species *do *evolve in response to their environment. Lamarkism postulated that *individuals *evolve in response tot heir environment, which, while true, is not the primary mechanism of evolutionary change.

If Asimov actually said that then he was either an idiot or an ignoramous. An ignoramous because he didn’t actually know what Lamarkism is or an idiot because he knew what Lamarkism was and totally failed to address it.

Partially.

You’re ignoring the possibility that Asimov liked to make jokes.

Actually this is bad science. Jewish men are not “striving” to be born without a foreskin. This is like that classic mouse experiment with cutting the tails off, simple bad science, it doesn;t disprove Lamarkism at all. Now, sure, what we can observe and to some extent replicate in nature does show that Darwinism is the primary engine of evolution. But there’s some evidence that Lamarkism may be right at certain levels.

wiki "*Lamarckism and single-celled organisms

While Lamarckism has been discredited as an evolutionary influence for larger lifeforms, some scientists controversially argue that it can be observed among microorganisms.[30] Whether such mutations are directed or not also remains in contention. (see Horizontal Gene Transfer)
In 1988, John Cairns at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, England, and a group of other scientists renewed the Lamarckian controversy (which at that point had been a dead debate for many years).[31] The group took a mutated strain of E. coli that was unable to consume the sugar lactose and placed it in an environment where lactose was the only food source. They observed over time that mutations occurred within the colony at a rate that suggested the bacteria were overcoming their handicap by altering their own genes. Cairns, among others, dubbed the process adaptive mutation.
If bacteria that had overcome their own inability to consume lactose passed on this “learned” trait to future generations, it could be argued as a form of Lamarckism; though Cairns later chose to distance himself from such a position.[32] More typically, it might be viewed as a form of ontogenic evolution.
There has been some research into Lamarckism and prions. A group of researchers, for example, discovered that in yeast cells containing a specific prion protein Sup35, the yeast were able to gain new genetic material, some of which gave them new abilities such as resistance to a particular herbicide. When the researchers crossed the yeast cells with cells not containing the prion, the trait reappeared in some of the resulting offspring, indicating that some information indeed was passed down, though whether or not the information is genetic is debatable: trace prion amounts in the cells may be passed to their offspring, giving the appearance of a new genetic trait where there is none.[33]
Finally, there is growing evidence that cells can activate low-fidelity DNA polymerases in times of stress to induce mutations. While this does not directly confer advantage to the organism on the organismal level, it makes sense at the gene-evolution level. While the acquisition of new genetic traits is random, and selection remains Darwinian, the active process of identifying the necessity to mutate is considered to be Lamarckian.
*
Blake is right.

Why Darwinian evolution quickly overtook Lamarckian evolution:

Here’s another thread of the story, as I learned it in College General Biology:
The idea that the earth was rather older than 6000 years was picking up steam also in those days.

The geologist Sir Charles Lyell studied geological strata and contributed convincing data to show that the world had been around much longer than that.

Lamarckian evolution, apparently, was thought to be fast-acting – that is, something that could have taken place in the 6000 years that the earth had been around. Darwinian evolution couldn’t possibly have happened anywhere near that fast. As Lyell’s data became established, Darwinian evolution became plausible. This was all taking place contemporaneous with the development of Darwin’s theories.

(The field of genetics became known much later, and could not have provided any support to Darwin’s theories in his own time.)

There is a more fundamental difference between Lamark’s theory of evolution and Darwin’s than the mechanisms they proposed (inheritance of acquired characteristics versus natural selection). Darwin, like biologists today, saw species as branching from a common root, where one species may differentiate into several others over time, and where many species (most even) eventually go extinct. This is fundamental to Darwinian evolution, and to explaining the original evidence that convinced him that evolution must be real. He realized it was the only reasonable way to explain the distribution of species around the world, especially, but not only, in isolated environments like the Galapagos. (Similar experiences studying the ecology of isolated islands, independently lead A.R. Wallace to the same conclusions a few years later.) Not only is Lamark unable to explain this data, it can’t be convincingly explained by the hypothesis (still the most popular at the time), that God created all the different species individually, and put them in the parts of the world to which they would be best adapted. (Only a schizophrenic God, if that, would distribute species geographically the way they actually are distributed.) Only after Darwin had come to the conclusion that evolution, of this branching, differentiating form, must be occurring, did he deliberately set out to find a mechanism that could be causing it. It took him a few more years hard work to come up with the idea of natural selection, and he would never have done that work if he had not already become convinced that branching, differentiating evolution had to be real.

Most evolutionists writing before Darwin (including, most notably, his grandfather Erasmus, and Robert Chambers) did not have his clear sense of evolution as a process of differentiation. Mostly they just liked the vague idea that living things were always changing and improving over time. Lamark’s conception was more specific, but it directly rejected the idea of evolution and speciation through differentiation that was central for Darwin (and for us). Lamark held that every species had its own independent origin as some sort of very simple organism at some point in the past, and gradually, over the course of time, evolved to become more complex and advanced. The more complex organisms around today, such as humans, were the older species who had had more time to evolve. Relatively simple species around today, earthworms, for instance, were younger species, created (or sontaneously generated from non-living matter) more recently, that had not had nearly so much time to evolve as yet. Lamark held that no species (or ‘lineages’) ever go extinct. He could not believe that a benevolent, omniscient God would create species only to let them become extinct, and, indeed, one of the main motivators for his theory was to explain away the evidence of fossils of types of organism that no longer seem to be around. According to Lamark, the explanation is not that they have died out, but that they have evolved into something else. The direct descendant of the T. Rex, the brontosaurus (yeah, I know!:rolleyes:) and the trilobite are, according to Lamark, still with us today, but looking very different.

In the context of this view of the structure of evolution, Lamark’s theory about the mechanism of evolution (inheritance of acquired characteristics) makes a lot of sense, and natural selection (which depends on the idea that most organisms are evolutionary dead ends, with their lineage doomed to go extinct) makes no sense at all. The trouble is that, though it explains fossils (in a way), it does not at all explain the evidence about the geographical distributions of species that had motivated Darwin.

The Darwinian evolutionary structure of differentiation and extinction, by contrast, explains not only the fossil record but also the biogeographical data that concerned Darwin (and, it eventually turned out, lots of other things too), and this is so even before we bring in the mechanism of natural selection. In fact, the Lamarkian inheritance of acquired characteristics mechanism is not particularly incompatible with the Darwinian evolutionary structure, and Darwin himself was prepared to believe that it might really happen and be an additional mechanism of evolution alongside natural selection. In fact, he gave this Lamarckian mechanism more and more credence in his later books, including later editions, published during his lifetime, of the Origin of Species. It was not shown to be unworkable until a much deeper understanding of genetics had been attained, in the early twentieth century.

Natural selection is important, and Darwin (and, independently, Wallace) discovered it. More fundamental, however, is the conception of evolution as a process of extinction driven differentiation, and that was also first clearly conceived of by Darwin, and, later and independently, by Wallace. It led both of them, fairly quickly, to the idea of natural selection as the mechanism driving it. Evolutionists before Darwin and Wallace did not understand the evolutionary process as being structured in this way. Most had no very clear sense of its structure at all, and Lamark’s structure was quite different and incompatible. As a consequence, their theories of evolution did not explain very much, and attracted few followers. Darwin’s theory explains a lot, but the lion’s share of that explanatory power (in its early decades, at least) came not from the idea of natural selection, but from the idea of evolution as a process of differentiation, where, like the first pair of finches blown by Pacific storms onto the Galapagos, one species can give rise to several more before it itself dies out.

While not perfect, nor widely known, I believe the work of Gregor Mendel could have provided some level of support.

Incidentally, to directly address the OP’s question, by far the most important rival to Darwin’s theory, at the time, and most widely held before his time, was the idea that each species was individually and “specially” created by God, in more or less its current form. It was virtually indistinguishable from the “intelligent design” theory that is pushed by creationists today, except that the 19th century creationists were not motivated by reactionary political ideology and a slavish and blind commitment to the literal truth of the Bible, but simply by the fact that they could not think of any other remotely plausible explanation of where all these living things, with all their incredible complexities, had come from. Many of them were quite happy to concede that God must have created different species at different time over the history of the Earth. They were not committed to the Genesis story, although they sometimes made appeal to aspects of it: to Noah’s flood much more than to the seven days of creation. However, even Noah’s flood had, before Darwin’s time, come to be seen by many as a legendary memory of just the last of a whole series of catastrophic worldwide floods, eons apart, the rest of which had occurred long before the creation of mankind, and had all caused mass extinctions and left their traces in the geological record.

(The man who taught Darwin his geological fieldwork skills, Adam Sedgwick, was a firm proponent of this view of the Earth’s history. However, although he was an ordained Church of England clergyman - as all Oxbridge professors had to be at that time - in his geological writings he, for the most part, avoided any mention of God or the Bible, and stuck closely to the evidence of the rocks and fossils.)