yo, the two people you’re talking about are both really cool dudes and yes they should be more widely known but stop spreading misinformation. do not use lies to spread the word about cool people and things.
the concept that things evolved from other things was already an idea floating around for basically ever in any scientific circle not completely dominated by creationism. like, darwin didn’t come up with it and he never claimed to. you can find dozens of natural philosophers throughout history like “yo i’m pretty sure that there’s some evolution going on here.”
it was not like the scientists in the 1850s were finding fossils of transitional forms and being like “LOL well dragons i guess!” it was already getting pretty obvious to academics in the 19th century that the earth was really old, life had gone through some serious changes, and there were common ancestors and related species. once maps got good enough for people to go “fuck dude africa and south america fit together” young earth creationism was fucked.
the problem was that there was no mechanism they could devise that would explain how creatures changed from one form into another, which was really kind of the vital piece of the whole thing. they had evidence that there was an evolution of life, but no way to build a theory because they had no way of showing how it might happen. some people were playing with the idea that creatures picked up traits from the environment and passed those to their kids.. somehow, but they had no evidence. they had a chain with no links.
then darwin comes along with some sketches of birds and he’s like “hey so here’s what going on. gregor mendel has shown that traits can be passed along, i’m gonna propose that what’s happening is, creatures that are best suited for an environment to flourish, so this preserves and eventually exaggerates certain traits over time to cause divergences. you go back far enough, like billions of years, all life coulda started from just a few basic types, or maybe even just one ancestor.”
darwin didn’t discover evolution. he proposed evolution by natural selection and he was right.
i mean, mostly. we had to correct his theory a whole bunch as we learned more about things like genetics and dna. he was actually kinda wrong about a ton of shit but that’s to be expected.
secondly, what’s important about newton wasn’t his observations, it was his math. ibn al haytham made a lot of important discoveries and advanced a lot of ideas about physics, especially optics, the big science of the middle ages, but the principles he talked about weren’t quite there yet.
like, he did this whole essay talking about planetary motion which, while more accurate than his contemporaries, was fundamentally inaccurate clockwork universe stuff because he actually hadn’t discovered gravity as a useful theory and he wasn’t able to use it to make predictions about motion.
that doesn’t make him stupid or worthy of being forgotten or nothin’. thats not how science works. he made advances, he didn’t quite have the shape of things yet, his work was important.
newton, building on his successes, was like, yo dawg, orbital mechanics. its like falling, but you miss. here’s a form of math i fucking invented to show some proof. lets check that against the universe.
and we did. and when it turned out his predictions were slightly wrong, some other motherfucker named einstein fixed it. and when he was wrong, etc.
its almost like science is totally built in increments on people who came before and trying discrediting the people who made some of those increments for political reasons is basically just as fucked as forgetting the folks who did the foundation work.
spreading misinformation to try to lionize historical figures so they are acknowledged has the opposite effect. it makes people who know shit roll their eyes and ignore similar posts later on. it makes the people who do read them look like dumbasses when they try to spread the word. it makes you look like one of those liberal stereotypes who disregards reality when it is politically convenient and that is not a good thing to look like.
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