*Had Darwin never articulated and pushed for the advancement of his theories, what would modern science and technology look like? Especially, what specific commodities, medicines, technologies, etc. would likely not exist or be very different?
I ask this because while I’m sure the theory of evolution has been very influential (and forms the core of modern biology), I don’t know how Darwin’s theories directly traced their route across science to the modern age. Where did it start? How did it start becoming applicable? In other words, where did scientists begin taking evolution and using its precepts to make something useful?
*This is presuming that without Darwin other theorists talking about evolution were discounted/marginalized for at least several decades.
Not to discount the importance of evolutionary theory, but I can’t think of a single effect such a thing would have had on the day-to-day existence of the average person or to any field of technology. The one area one might think would be affected, agriculture, already benefited from artificial selection thousands of years before the fundamentals of evolution were even conceived.
How many of the necessary components of evolution would we still know about? Heritability of traits, for example? Selective breeding of anything makes no sense unless we at least know about it.
It would affect medicine, because evolution is a major part of understanding biology. Such as the evolution of drug resistance in microorganisms and cancer. It would hamper our understanding of cancer in general.
It would hurt agriculture ( as Lamarckism did in the USSR ). Both by hampering our understanding of selective breeding, and our understanding of such things as the evolution of pesticide resistance.
It would eliminate the use of “genetic algorithms” in programming, and evolution-based computer aided design.
Are we that much better? (Genuine ignorance)
The general principles can’t have changed that much (select trait, breed till that trait is in the majority of offspring consistantly, select next trait - or select multiple traits simultaneously), and we managed some amazing achievements before we knew about Darwin.
Just compare European cows and African cows. (I know the joke that will be made, there is no need for it).
This might be a bit of a stretch, but geologists use the fossil record to help pinpoint petroleum and natural gas deposits. If the common belief was that life sprang up out of the blue only a few thousand years ago thanks to a mysterious creator then I don’t suppose that fossils would be of much help in that endeavor.
Actually, given that Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the same theory at the same time, I supect that it was pretty much inevitable. Even if Darwin had never published and Wallace had been lost in the wilds of Indonesia or New Guinea, Gregor Mendel was discovering the actions of genes–the powerplants of evolution–and someone would have recognized what that said about descent with modification, (as Dobzhansky actualy did). It might not have happened in the same way, but it was going to happen.
I believe that common ancestry has helped us make better educated guesses on which experimental animals might be good analogues for humans in drug trials and other medical research.