The living being and its environment: before and after Darwin

Abstract

Reiterated references to a presumed predarwinian adaptationism that we found in the present literature about evolutionary biology can produce a distorted image of the subjects and problems which really occupied the predarwinian naturalists and of the importance that these naturalists indeed gave to the study of the complex relations that the morphologic particularities of living beings keep with the environmental exigencies. In this work, I will try to show that this last topic did not occupy an important place in the natural history that immediately precedes the Darwinian Revolution; and I will suggest that this lack of interest was associated with the persistence of an idea of natural economy in which each living being had a function to fulfill and not a place to conquer and to defend. Finally, I will show how the change of attitude towards that topic stimulated by the Darwinism impacted in the work of the field naturalists.