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:
“Under that wide hearth
a nest of rattlers,
they’ll knot a hundred together,
had wintered and were coming awake.
The warming rock
flushed them out early.”
—Robert Morgan (b. 1944)
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)