One Out of Five

1. Out of the five individuals I would choose Thomas Malthus as having the most influence over Darwin's development of his theory of Natural Selection.

2. Thomas Malthus was actually an English economist that wrote an essay entitled, "An Essay on the Principle of Population." This essay, surprisingly, had an enormous impact upon the scientific community. It served as an huge influence to Charles Darwin and Russel Wallace in the discovery of Natural Selection. The essay proposed the idea that populations are producing more offspring at a higher rate than the natural resources to sustain them. Malthus' notion of limited resources creates competition among individuals for necessary survival. The scientific community, including Darwin then saw this as an important key to understanding how new species come to be. Some brief links to his influence include:

http://www.allaboutscience.org/thomas-malthus-faq.htm

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/malthus.html

3. The points directly affected by Thomas Malthus as partially noted above include "What is preventing organisms from reproducing at their potential?" and the fact that resources are limited. These main questions were answered by Darwin in reference to the essay written by Mathus. However, the other subsequent points were then derived from Darwin receiving the answer to these questions. In actuality, Malthus influenced many of these points directly without even having written on the questions themselves.

4. It is possible however, he gives a lot of credit to Malthus' essay for answering his major question of how species came to be. That was because Malthus' proposed the idea of what limits population growth. He also recognized that the facts Malthus derived lead to the struggle for existence which is the key to natural selection.