Charles Darwin

English naturalist (1809–1882) whose On the Origin of Species established evolution by natural selection as the organizing principle of the life sciences.

Darwin showed that the diversity of life could be explained by descent with modification under selection pressure — adaptation to conditions, accumulated over deep time, without design.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: forebear. For R. Buckminster Fuller, Darwinian adaptation was a predecessor framework to push beyond. Fuller repeatedly contrasted passive biological adaptation — organisms shaped by their environment — with his own design science, in which humanity uses intellect and technology to consciously reshape the environment to its advantage ("ephemeralization," doing more with less). Darwin thus stands in Fuller's rhetoric as the great account of adaptation that Fuller sought to complement with deliberate, anticipatory design.

See Also

• Lewis Mumford — fellow interpreter of technology, evolution, and the human prospect
• Robert Sapolsky — modern biologist of behavior and evolution in the corpus's science orbit
• Thomas Malthus (Thomas Malthus) — related figure

Sources

• Lewis Mumford (source reference) — situates evolutionary thought among the corpus's technology-and-humanity thinkers