Another issue that Darwin had is that for the theory of evolution to work you need very long periods of time.
The problem is that it has been proved by the physicist William Thomson using cold hard maths that the earth cannot be older that few hundreds millions years, which is not compatible with Darwin’s theory.
History told us that Darwin was right and Thomson wrong but it did not appeared this way at the time.
It should also be noted that huge parts of the Church also rejected William Thomson’s age calculations for the Earth. Even though he massively underestimated its age, the Church asserted that the Earth was even younger.
We need a few more heroes and a lot more peas to solve some of these other problems:
Horizontal Gene Transfer upsets the conceptual “tree of life”, i.e. if genetics are not exclusively hereditary then it is impossible to determine a last universal common ancestor (LUCA).
Lack of a viable mechanism for producing the complex and specific information required to render the genetic code functional.
Failure of the fossil record to find support for Darwinian evolution (punctuated equilibrium, Cambrian explosion, etc).
Rampant examples of convergent evolution indicate extreme improbability.
Epigenetics cannot be reduced to a mechanism, certainly not natural selection.
“Phenotypic Plasticity” - the correlation between genotypes and phenotypes are no longer 1:1.
Beneficial mutations are impossibly rare. In almost all cases, mutations are degenerative, as demonstrated by Richard Lenski’s bacteria experiment and Molly Burke’s fruit fly experiment - both published in Nature.
Missing link fallacy. We have much, much more evidence for evolution than we do for creation, but because we don’t have all the evidence, you choose to reject all of it in favour of theories that have even less evidence behind them.
Mendel wanted to do his experiments with rats but the church didn’t gave him enough money and support so he had to use peas. Rats genetics are way more complex that peas and it would be hard for him to get to any meaningful results using them.
I remember learning about that in that video, if isn’t there then it could be in the podcast “History of philosophy without any gaps” but no idea in what episode.
Darwin articulated the theory of evolution by natural selection.
It goes like this:
Individuals in a community vary in their physical properties. Some may be larger or smaller, faster, stronger, or smarter.
This variability can affect the chances for those individuals possessing more favorable characteristics to survive and reproduce better than the other variants.
If those physical properties are inherited, then the ones who reproduce more leads to having the next generation of their population having more individuals with that property.
What it boils down to is that evolution is the change in the gene pool of a population over time. Natural selection was the term coined to mean that nature breeds animals and plants just like farmers do - it chooses based on the characteristics it “wants” - by which I mean the ones who survive and reproduce more successfully.
So far, so good.
The problem is that while Darwin was working that out, biology still held to a model that we call “blending inheritance.” They knew that offspring could inherit traits from both parents, and they thought the result was a blend of the two - a short person having a kid with a tall person would produce a medium sized kid, and so on.
Blending is completely incompatible with Darwin’s theory, and he worked really hard to fit that square peg into the round hole. He never did.
The irony is that during this same period Mendel was doing breeding experiments on pea plants, crossing tall with short, or different colors of flowers, and so on. He demonstrated that inheritance is particulate. Rather than a blend, it was a random mixture of alternate individual genes that caused the variety in the offspring. Basically, if you cross a plant with wrinkled peas with one with smooth peas, half the offspring will be wrinkled and half smooth. You don’t wind up with plants that had semi-wrinkled peas or which have a mixture of both. Unfortunately for Darwin, Mendel’s work remained undiscovered for decades. (I’m not sure whether wrinkled is actually a 50/50 or not, I’m just using that as an illustration).
It wasn’t until the 1940s that the two biggest ideas in biology were brought together in what’s called the modern synthesis. That’s where we began what could be considered modern evolutionary biology.
Mendel was extremely fortunate to have been working with plants that showed dominant and regressive characteristics so clearly.
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