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The Struggle For Existence
The concept of the struggle for existence concerns the competition or battle for resources needed to live. It can refer to human society, or to organisms in nature. The concept is ancient, and the term ''struggle for existence'' was in use by the end of the 18th century. From the 17th century onwards the concept was associated with a population exceeding resources, an issue shown starkly in Thomas Robert Malthus’ ''An Essay on the Principle of Population'' which drew on Benjamin Franklin's ''Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.''. Charles Darwin used the phrase "struggle for existence" in a broader sense, and chose the term as the title to the third chapter of ''On the Origin of Species'' published in 1859. Using Malthus's idea of the struggle for existence, Darwin was able to develop his view of adaptation, which was highly influential in the formulation of the theory of natural selection.Ospovat, Dov. ''The Development of Darwin's Theory: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Bouverie Goddard04a
George may refer to: People * George (given name) * George (surname) * George (singer), American-Canadian singer George Nozuka, known by the mononym George * George Washington, First President of the United States * George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States * George H. W. Bush, 41st President of the United States * George V, King of Great Britain, Ireland, the British Dominions and Emperor of India from 1910-1936 * George VI, King of Great Britain, Ireland, the British Dominions and Emperor of India from 1936-1952 * Prince George of Wales * George Papagheorghe also known as Jorge / GEØRGE * George, stage name of Giorgio Moroder * George Harrison, an English musician and singer-songwriter Places South Africa * George, Western Cape ** George Airport United States * George, Iowa * George, Missouri * George, Washington * George County, Mississippi * George Air Force Base, a former U.S. Air Force base located in California Characters * George (Peppa Pig), a 2-year-old ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Al-Jahiz
Abū ʿUthman ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Kinānī al-Baṣrī ( ar, أبو عثمان عمرو بن بحر الكناني البصري), commonly known as al-Jāḥiẓ ( ar, links=no, الجاحظ, ''The Bug Eyed'', born 776 – died December 868/January 869) was a prose writer and author of works of literature, theology, zoology, and politico-religious polemics. He described himself as a member of the Arabian tribe Banu Kinanah. A thousand years before Darwin, Al-Jahiz came to the conclusion that there must be some mechanisms that influence the evolution of animals. He writes about three main mechanisms; the struggle for existence, the transformation of species into each other, and the environmental factors. He is therefore credited with outlining the principles of natural selection. Ibn al-Nadim lists nearly 140 titles attributed to Al-Jahiz, of which 75 are extant. The best known are ''Kitāb al-Ḥayawān'' (The book of Animals), a seven-part compendium on an array of subjects w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Smellie (encyclopedist)
William Smellie (1740–1795) was a Scottish printer who edited the first edition of the ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. He was also a naturalist and antiquary, who was joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, co-founder of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and a friend of Robert Burns. Early life He was born in The Pleasance, in south-east Edinburgh in 1740, the son of Alexander Smellie, architect and master builder, and of his wife, Jean Robertson. He was educated at Duddingston School then Edinburgh High School. Smellie left school at 12 to years old to be apprenticed as a printer to Hamilton, Balfour & Neill in 1752. During this time he was promoted to the subeditorial position corrector of the press, and won his firm the Edinburgh Philosophical Society's prize for the most accurately printed edition of a Latin text. On completion of his apprenticeship he joined the firm of Murray & Cochran as a corrector for the ''Scots Magazine''. He spent three hours per da ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Johann Gottfried Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder ( , ; 25 August 174418 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, ''Sturm und Drang'', and Weimar Classicism. Biography Born in Mohrungen (now Morąg, Poland) in the Kingdom of Prussia, Herder grew up in a poor household, educating himself from his father's Bible and songbook. In 1762, as a youth of 17, he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, about 60 miles (100 km) north of Mohrungen, where he became a student of Immanuel Kant. At the same time, Herder became an intellectual protégé of Johann Georg Hamann, a Königsberg philosopher who disputed the claims of pure secular reason. Hamann's influence led Herder to confess to his wife later in life that "I have too little reason and too much idiosyncrasy", yet Herder can justly claim to have founded a new school of German political thought. Although himself an unsociable person, Herder influenced his contempor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy. In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" which structure all experience, and therefore that, while " things-in-themselves" exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere "appearances", and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is unknowable to us. In an attempt to counter the skepticism he found in the writings of philosopher David Hume, he wrote the '' Critique of Pure Reason'' (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo
James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (baptised 25 October 1714; died 26 May 1799) was a Scottish judge, scholar of linguistic evolution, philosopher and deist. He is most famous today as a founder of modern comparative historical linguistics. In 1767 he became a judge in the Court of Session. As such, Burnett adopted an honorary title based on the name of his father's estate and family seat, Monboddo House. Monboddo was one of a number of scholars involved at the time in development of early concepts of biological evolution. Some credit him with anticipating in principle the idea of natural selection that was read by (and acknowledged in the writings of) Erasmus Darwin. Charles Darwin read the works of his grandfather Erasmus and later developed the ideas into a scientific theory. Early years James Burnett was born in 1714 at Monboddo House in Kincardineshire, Scotland. After his primary education at the parish school of Laurencekirk, he studied at Marischal College, Aberdeen, fro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as . Linnaeus was born in Råshult, the countryside of Småland, in southern Sweden. He received most of his higher education at Uppsala University and began giving lectures in botany there in 1730. He lived abroad between 1735 and 1738, where he studied and also published the first edition of his ' in the Netherlands. He then returned to Sweden where he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. In the 1740s, he was sent on several journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants and animals. In the 1750s and 1760s, he continued to collect an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Natural Theology
Natural theology, once also termed physico-theology, is a type of theology that seeks to provide arguments for theological topics (such as the existence of a deity) based on reason and the discoveries of science. This distinguishes it from revealed theology, which is based on scripture and/or religious experiences, also from transcendental theology, which is based on ''a priori'' reasoning. It is thus a type of philosophy, with the aim of explaining the nature of the celestial motors, or gods, or of one supreme god, that are responsible for heavenly motion. Aristotle's tractate on metaphysics claims to demonstrate the necessary existence of an unmoved prime mover. For monotheistic religions, this principally involves arguments about the attributes or non-attributes of a deity, and especially the deity's existence, using arguments that do not involve recourse to revelation. The ideals of natural theology can be traced back to the Old Testament and Greek philosophy. Ear ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proceedings Of The American Philosophical Society
''Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society'' is a quarterly journal published by the American Philosophical Society since 1838. The journal contains papers which have been read at meetings of the American Philosophical Society each April and November, independent essays sent to the APS by outside scholars, and biographical memoirs of APS Members. References External links * Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Biodiversity Heritage Library The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as worldwide consortiumof natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working toge ... * {{HathiTrust Catalog 1838 establishments in the United States Academic journals published by learned and professional societies Publications established in 1838 Quarterly journals ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Exponential Growth
Exponential growth is a process that increases quantity over time. It occurs when the instantaneous rate of change (that is, the derivative) of a quantity with respect to time is proportional to the quantity itself. Described as a function, a quantity undergoing exponential growth is an exponential function of time, that is, the variable representing time is the exponent (in contrast to other types of growth, such as quadratic growth). If the constant of proportionality is negative, then the quantity decreases over time, and is said to be undergoing exponential decay instead. In the case of a discrete domain of definition with equal intervals, it is also called geometric growth or geometric decay since the function values form a geometric progression. The formula for exponential growth of a variable at the growth rate , as time goes on in discrete intervals (that is, at integer times 0, 1, 2, 3, ...), is x_t = x_0(1+r)^t where is the value of at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (; 7 September 1707 – 16 April 1788) was a French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and encyclopédiste. His works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including two prominent French scientists Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier. Buffon published thirty-six quarto volumes of his ''Histoire Naturelle'' during his lifetime, with additional volumes based on his notes and further research being published in the two decades following his death. Ernst Mayr wrote that "Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century".Mayr, Ernst 1981. ''The Growth of Biological Thought''. Cambridge: Harvard. p 330 Credited with being one of the first naturalists to recognize ecological succession, he was later forced by the theology committee at the University of Paris to recant his theories about geological history and animal evolution because they contradicted the Biblical na ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Matthew Hale (jurist)
Sir Matthew Hale (1 November 1609 – 25 December 1676) was an influential English barrister, judge and jurist most noted for his treatise ''Historia Placitorum Coronæ'', or ''The History of the Pleas of the Crown''. Born to a barrister and his wife, who had both died by the time he was 5, Hale was raised by his father's relative, a strict Puritan, and inherited his faith. In 1626 he matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford (now Hertford College), intending to become a priest, but after a series of distractions was persuaded to become a barrister like his father, thanks to an encounter with a Serjeant-at-Law in a dispute over his estate. On 8 November 1628, he joined Lincoln's Inn, where he was called to the Bar on 17 May 1636. As a barrister, Hale represented a variety of Royalist figures during the prelude and duration of the English Civil War, including Thomas Wentworth and William Laud; it has been hypothesised that Hale was to represent Charles I at his state trial, and con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
