William Dallinger facts for kids
William Henry Dallinger was a British minister in the Wesleyan Methodist Church. He was born on July 5, 1839, and passed away on November 7, 1909. He was also a very talented scientist. He was the first person to study the full life cycle of unicellular organisms under a microscope. These are tiny living things made of just one cell. He also studied how these organisms changed to live in different temperatures.
Dallinger made many important discoveries using microscopes. He was even the president of the Quekett Microscopical Club from 1889 to 1892. This was a group for people interested in microscopes. He received three special university degrees for his scientific work.
William Dallinger was married to Emma Ion Goldsmith. They had one son named Percy Gough.
Dallinger's Amazing Experiments
Dallinger was one of the first scientists to do a careful experiment on how living things change over time. This is sometimes called a controlled evolution experiment. In the late 1800s, he grew tiny one-celled organisms in a special machine called an incubator. He did this for seven years, from 1880 to 1886.
Dallinger slowly raised the temperature inside the incubator. He started at about 15 °C (60 °F). He slowly increased it all the way up to about 70 °C (158 °F). The organisms he started with did not like temperatures above 23 °C (73 °F). They certainly could not live at 70 °C.
However, the organisms Dallinger had at the end of his experiment were perfectly fine at 70 °C. But these new organisms could no longer grow at the cooler starting temperature of 15 °C. Dallinger realized he had found proof of natural selection. This is a key idea from Charles Darwin about how living things adapt. The organisms in his incubator had changed to live in a very hot environment.
Sadly, Dallinger's incubator was accidentally broken in 1886. Because of this, he could not continue his important research.
Dallinger was an early supporter of Darwin's ideas. He believed that living things change over time through natural selection. He thought that the idea of creationism (that life was created exactly as it is now) was "absolutely impossible." He believed that science and religion did not have to disagree. He felt there was no need to try and make the Book of Genesis (from the Bible) fit with what geologists learned about Earth's history.
