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Darwinism
Darwinism names the body of theory originating with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and continuing to develop across the century-and-a-half since. At its core are two related theses: that all living things share common ancestry, and that natural selection — differential survival and reproduction acting on heritable variation — is a principal mechanism producing the diversity of life. The term also covers the broader tradition of evolutionary thought that followed — the integration with genetics, the extensions and disputes that have continued through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the social and cultural applications that have been made under Darwin’s name.
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- The mechanism — natural selection and sexual selection: how the Darwinian mechanism works, what it requires, and common misunderstandings of its operation.
- Common descent — the historical kinship thesis: all living things share common ancestry. The tree of life and the evidence base that has accumulated since Darwin.
- The integration with genetics — from Mendel’s rediscovery in 1900 through population genetics to the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s–40s and the molecular era.
- After the Synthesis — where the Modern Synthesis has been extended, contested, or supplemented: neutral theory, kin selection, evo-devo, niche construction, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis debate.
- Social Darwinism — the reception and misuse history. How Darwin’s biology was extended into social and political theory, and how the label was constructed and applied.
- Cultural extensions — the extension of evolutionary thinking beyond biology into culture, psychology, economics, and elsewhere. Where the analogies work and where they break.