Organisms and Environments Integrated Through Coevolution

Abstract

When Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace jointly presented papers on the processes that operate to evolve new species before the Linnean Society in July, 1858, they sparked an era of debate and controversy. The continuing debate centers not on the fact of natural evolution but on the mechanisms of evolution. In many ways the modern discussion recalls the debates between catastrophists, progressionists, and uniformitarianists of Charles Lyell’s time in the 1830’s. Catastrophism held that there were worldwide breaks in the geologic and biologic record by forces more powerful than those being observed and experienced in contemporary times. At the time that catastrophism was a popular theory, Jean Baptiste Lamarck was carrying out experimental work on aerobic and anaerobic bacteria and their ability to survive within various regimes of atmospheric oxygen. Lamarck contributed to the understanding of organic evolution by noting advances in the complexity of the composition of fossils within geologic strata over time. Progressionism wedded the idea of catastrophism with Lamarck’s conception of advance in the complexity of life during geologic ages. It held that various geologic ages were closed with the extinction of all species by catastrophic events and that more advanced organisms successively arose (by the intervention of a deity) to mark the progression of the evolution of organisms. James Hutton and his student Charles Lyell emphasized the gradualness of evolution and suggested that the geologic record with its increasing variety of species could be fully explained by presently observable natural processes (Eiseley 1959, Browne 1983).