Alfred Russel Wallace’s ‘Pure Darwinism’: Contributions to Modern Evolutionary Theory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/asclepio.2020.25Keywords:
Alfred Russel Wallace, Charles Darwin, Darwinism, Neodarwinism, Natural SelectionAbstract
History tends to insist on remembering the case of Alfred Russel Wallace as one who, secondarily, supported Darwin’s proposal. For the purposes of this work it is presented what Wallace called in his work Darwinism (1889) the basic elements of ‘pure Darwinism’, which would serve as the basis for what George John Romanes would call Neodarwinism, based on both Wallace’s and August Weismann’s work. These elements include ideas that are commonly associated exclusively with Charles Darwin’s work, such as the biological concept of species, the different types of variation and their origin, the importance of natural selection as the preponderant mechanism to understand evolution, the rejection of Lamarckian mechanisms, among other points. From the above, the aims of this work are twofold: on the one hand, to rescue those basic concepts from Wallace’s pure Darwinism; and on the other, to establish some possible explanations as to why the idea persists that Wallace’s work does not seem to have been of importance for the development of Modern Synthesis.
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