[lit-ideas] The Missing Link
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 May 2014 10:23:24 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 5/19/2014 4:45:53 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes:
Or have I missed something?
Dnl
Simple-minded Darwinist
Ldn
Geary, who describes his self as a complex-minded Darwinist states that the
"Missing Link" will possibly remain Darwin's problem _for ever_ (at least
*for Darwin*).
Cheers,
Speranza
---
From Geary's "Darwiniana": "The term "missing link" is used to refer back
to the originally static pre-evolutionary concept of the great chain of
being, a deist idea that all existence is linked, from the lowest dirt, through
the living kingdoms to angels and finally to God."
"The lowest dirt is possibly the origin of Godliness is next to
cleanliness."
"The idea of all living things being linked through some sort of
transmutation process, however, predates Darwin's theory of evolution -- if
theory
it can be called, rather than 'mere hypothesis'."
"Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, to mention just one, envisioned that life is
generated in the form of the simplest creatures constantly, and then strive
towards complexity and perfection (i.e. humans) through a series of lower
forms."
"In Lamarck's view, lower animals were simply newcomers on the evolutionary
scene, as we may put it."
"After Darwin's On the Origin of Species, however, the idea of "lower
animals" representing earlier stages in evolution lingered, as demonstrated in
Ernst Haeckel's figure of the human pedigree."
"While the vertebrates were then seen as forming a sort of evolutionary
sequence, the various classes were distinct, the undiscovered intermediate
forms being called "missing links"".
"And the expression stuck."
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