Portal:Islam/Selected article/34

History of evolutionary thought traces the history of the idea that species change over time, which has roots in antiquity, in the ideas of the Greeks, Romans, Chinese and Muslims. However, until the 18th century, Western biological thinking was dominated by essentialism, the idea that living forms are unchanging. This started to change when, during the Enlightenment, evolutionary cosmology and the mechanical philosophy spread from the physical sciences to natural history. Naturalists began to focus on the variability of species; the emergence of paleontology with the concept of extinction further undermined the static view of nature. In the early 19th century, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed his theory of the transmutation of species, which was the first fully formed scientific theory of evolution. In 1858, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published a new evolutionary theory, which was explained in detail in Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Unlike Lamarck, Darwin proposed common descent and a branching tree of life. The theory was based on the idea of natural selection, and it synthesized a broad range of evidence from animal husbandry, biogeography, geology, morphology, and embryology. Darwin's work led to the rapid acceptance of evolution, but the mechanism he proposed, natural selection, was not widely accepted until the 1940s.