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Did Darwin plagiarise natural selection?

01:0116 Sep, 2015

Many people think that Charles Darwin first thought of the idea of natural selection. However, others prior to Darwin described the concept, although they sometimes used slightly different terminology.

For instance, Carl Linnaeus, the creationist ‘father of taxonomy’ wrote of a ‘struggle for survival’ in nature. Similarly, James Hutton wrote about the concept of natural selection. Probably the most influential character was Edward Blyth, an English chemist and zoologist who wrote major articles on natural selection two decades before Darwin published the Origin of Species.

Darwin differed in trying to use the concept of natural selection to promote the idea of unlimited change. However, modern studies of natural selection have revealed that it is limited. It can only select between variations that already exist—it is incapable of producing the new genetic information required for true evolutionary change to occur, such as growing feathers on a reptile.

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