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:
“Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)
“What we think of as our sensitivity is only the higher evolution of terror in a poor dumb beast. We suffer for nothing. Our own death wish is our only real tragedy.”
—Mario Puzo (b. 1920)