Biodiversity. Darwin's mockingbirds knock finches off perch. Darwin's finches are the better-known birds connected with helping Darwin come to his conclusions on evolution.
However, it was the little-known mockingbirds that were the key. San Cristobal mockingbird © Zoological Museum of the University of Zurich Voyage of the Beagle While on his 5-year voyage on the Beagle to South America, Darwin noticed differences in mockingbirds he saw on different islands in the Galapagos. History of evolutionary thought. Evolutionary thought, the conception that species change over time, has roots in antiquity, in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Chinese as well as in medieval Islamic science.
With the beginnings of biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, Western biological thinking was influenced by two opposed ideas. One was essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept which had developed from medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, and that fit well with natural theology. The other one was the development of the new anti-Aristotelian approach to modern science: as the Enlightenment progressed, 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. Evolution Resources: Students.