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SweetFreedom Posted 12 years ago
Grammar

Carrying capacities for the environment?

Does "carrying capacities for the environment" mean "(and the populations) having the abilities to impact the environment"?

Background info:

Who influenced Charles Darwin and how?


Who are some people that influenced Charles Darwin in some way, and how did they do it?


Answer:

There were many scientists and scholars that influenced Charles Darwin:

1) Thomas Malthus wrote essays about populations and carrying capacities for the environment. Malthus was an economist and his ideas about overpopulation, disease, and the struggle to survive influenced Darwin.
2) Charles Lyell influenced Darwin. Lyell was a geologist who came up with the idea of uniformitarianism, which means that the same processes that were at work in the past are at work in the present. Lyell was the first geologist to come up with an estimate of the great age of the earth, based on the processes of erosion.
3) Georges Cuvier, the father of comparative anatomy, was another great influence on Darwin. Cuvier was among the first to examine dinosaur fossils, and establish that animals in the far distant past were different from today. He postulated that some factors of change must be at work in a kind of modification, or evolution, of species.
4) Charles Lamarck also had the idea of organisms changing, but his idea was that of acquired traits that are passed on from generation to generation. For example, he explained the long necks of giraffes to have come about because they continually stretched their necks to get at the tree leaves. "Unlike Darwin, Lamarck held that evolution was a constant process of striving toward greater complexity and perfection. Even though this belief eventually gave way to Darwin's theory of natural selection acting on random variation, Lamarck is credited with helping put evolution on the map and with acknowledging that the environment plays a role in shaping the species that live in it."
Source:
pbs.org
5) Alfred Russel Wallace also influenced Darwin. Quite independently, he came up with the same idea of evolution by natural selection. Darwin got his "Origin of Species" to the publisher first.
  

Top answer

Hi The 'carrying capacity' of a species and environment is the maximum number of individuals in the species that the environment can support It does follow that if there are too many individuals then there is an impact on the environment - a bad impact However, it's not so simple. Where I live, there are hundreds more people than a hundred years before. But we deal with that with better housing, sanitation, community services, and so on I don't think Malthus would have said 'carrying capacity'.

  • Hi The 'carrying capacity' of a species and environment is the maximum number of individuals in the species that the environment can support It does follow that if there are too many individuals then there is an impact on the environment - a bad impact However, it's not so simple.
  • Where I live, there are hundreds more people than a hundred years before.
  • But we deal with that with better housing, sanitation, community services, and so on I don't think Malthus would have said 'carrying capacity'.
  • I think that comes quite a bit later Dave
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1 Answers
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Hi

The 'carrying capacity' of a species and environment is the maximum number of individuals in the species that the environment can support

It does follow that if there are too many individuals then there is an impact on the environment - a bad impact

However, it's not so simple. Where I live, there are hundreds more people than a hundred years before. But we deal wit

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