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Every period in the history of civilized humans was dominated by a definite set of ideas or ideologies. This is as true for the ancient Greeks as for Christianity, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and modern times. It is a challenging question to ask what the source is of the dominating ideas of the present era. One can ask this question also in different terms. For instance, which books have had the greatest impact on current thinking? Inevitably, the Bible would have to be mentioned in first place. Before 1989, when the bankruptcy of Marxism was declared, Karl Marx's Das Kapital would clearly have been in second place, and it is still a dominating influence in many parts of the world. Sigmund Freud has been in and out of favor. Albert Einstein's biographer Abraham Pais made the exuberant claim that Einstein's theories “have profoundly changed the way modern men and women think about the phenomena of inanimate nature.” No sooner had Pais said this, though, than he recognized the exaggeration. “It would actually be better to say ‘modern scientists’ than ‘modern men and woman,’” he wrote, because one needs schooling in the physicalist style of thought and mathematical techniques to appreciate Einstein's contributions. Indeed I doubt that any of the great discoveries in the physics of the 1920s had any influence whatsoever on the thinking of the average person. However, the situation is different with Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is not my intention, in these two chapters on theories of evolutionary mechanism, to give a detailed history. For a more complete account readers should consult Mayr 's Growth of Biological Thought (1982), Bowler 's (1983) account of rival theories to Darwinism from the publication of the Origin in 1859 until the development of the “Neo-Darwinian” synthetic theory and finally the multi-author work on the development of the synthesis itself (Mayr and Pro vine 1980). The pre-Darwinian history of evolutionary theory in nineteenth-century Britain is treated in its sociological context by Desmond (1989). These two chapters have four principal themes: in Chapter 11, (1) a discussion of Lamarck 's theory of mechanism, representing the first complete, if flawed, evolutionary theory; (2) a critique of Darwin's and Wallace 's theory of Natural Selection; (3) the contrasting theories supported “post Darwin” and referred to above; and, in Chapter 12, (4) a critique of the Synthetic Theory and reactions to it, thus bringing the account up to date. In passing, however, we may refer to the theories of Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Robert Chambers, both of whom have been discussed in previous chapters. Geoffroy (1772-1844) speculated about evolution late in life (Mayr 1982). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]