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Why Evolution is True is a popular science book by American biologist Jerry Coyne. It was published in 2009, dubbed "Darwin Year" as it marked the bicentennial of Charles Darwin and the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection .
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution (the idea that species arose through descent with modification from a single common ancestor in a process driven by natural selection) initially met opposition from scientists with different ...
Jerry Allen Coyne (born December 30, 1949) [4] [5] is an American biologist and skeptic known for his work on speciation and his commentary on intelligent design.A professor emeritus at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, he has published numerous papers on the theory of evolution.
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept ...
Free Agents author Kevin J. Mitchell makes a neuroscientific case against determinism.
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
The Causes of Evolution is a 1932 book on evolution by J.B.S. Haldane (1990 edition ISBN 0-691-02442-1), based on a series of January 1931 lectures entitled "A Re-examination of Darwinism". It was influential in the founding of population genetics and the modern synthesis .