Darwin, Wallace, and the Theory of Evolution

Long before Charles Darwin, naturalists sought to organize the diversity of life into coherent systems. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus published Systema Naturae in 1735 and, in later editions, established binomial nomenclature: a two-part Latin name combining genus and species that remains the standard for naming organisms today. His hierarchical classification, grouping species into genera, orders, classes, and kingdoms, imposed order on a natural world that earlier naturalists had struggled to catalog systematically. Linnaeus, like most of his contemporaries, assumed that species were fixed and unchanging, created individually and immutable since the origin of life, a position known as fixism. This view coexisted with the argument from design, later popularized by William Paley's 1802 Natural Theology, which likened the intricate adaptation of living organisms to a watch implying a watchmaker. The French anatomist Georges Cuvier, meanwhile, used comparative anatomy and the fossil record to demonstrate that entire species had gone extinct, a catastrophist framework that acknowledged change over time without embracing the idea that one species could transform into another.