Warming and Evolution
Warming was a firm believer in adaptation. However, he was a declared Lamarckist. In his popularizing book Nedstamningslæren (The theory of decendence; 1915), he reviewed the direct and indirect evidence for common decent of living organisms and for Darwinian natural selection as a process involved in speciation. His keen observations of how differently the same plant is grown under different circumstances (now known as phenotypic plasticity) led him to question the change of species by infinitesimally small steps as advocated by his contemporary Darwinists of the Biometry school, e.g. Karl Pearson. Warming summarized his view on the ways in which new species could may arise: 1) By inheritance of acquired characters; 2) By hybridization; 3) By natural selection, with the latter mechanism being the least important.
Read more about this topic: Eugenius Warming
Famous quotes containing the words warming and/or evolution:
“When cats run home and light is come,
And dew is cold upon the ground,
And the far-off stream is dumb,
And the whirring sail goes round,
And the whirring sail goes round;
Alone and warming his five wits,
The white owl in the belfry sits.”
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