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Darwin’s Influences on Modern Thought

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Darwin’s influences on modern thought

In the article, “Darwin’s Influence on Modern Thought” written by Ernst Mayr argues that Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories have influenced the thinking of every person, not just the scientific community. He states that no one with an education questions the legitimacy of Darwin’s theories which he believes are regarded as fact now. This article attempts to summarize what Mayr believes to be Darwin’s principal influences on modern thought. Evolution was Darwin’s first key influence. When this idea first surfaced, the majority of leading scientists and philosophers believed that the world was the creation of God, not the result of gradual natural forces. Mayr claimed that evolution must be a gradual process with its fundamental mechanism being natural selection. Mayr believes that Darwin’s theory of natural selection makes it pointless that the notion of teleological forces. If nature makes selections without help this leaves no room for dominant design, claims Mayr. The article suggests that natural selection is a product of randomness and chance, determinism, which suggests that all events are causal so that means they are also predictable. Darwin’s theory on human decent from apes, removed the opinion that man was uniquely advanced in the animal world. Mayr believed that even though the theory did explain our primitive fall, it did not weaken the idea of human supremacy and the fact that we are intelligent creatures with exceptional supremacy over all other beings. Mayr states and explains Darwin’s principal influences on modern thought by pointing to the theories of creation, diversity and change that existed before the conflict of Darwinian evolutionary theories. The old-fashioned theories of determinism, teleology, creationism, typology and the belief that scientific

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