The unification of biology with the rest of science first began to be possible in the mid-nineteenth century, with the independent proposals by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace of the theory of evolution through natural selection. Evolution was already a familiar idea, suggested by the fossil record. Many of those who accepted the reality of evolution explained it as a result of a fundamental principle of biology, an inherent tendency of living things to improve, a principle that would have ruled out any unification of biology with physical science. Darwin and Wallace instead proposed
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