Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
"It is of interest that even in the objective world of science man's mind is not more malleable than in the habit-bound world of everyday life. Max Planck maintained that a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents, but because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
The underlying theme of the essay is the need to teach biological evolution in the context of debate about creation and evolution in public education in the United States. [5] The fact that evolution occurs explains the interrelatedness of the various facts of biology, and so makes biology make sense. [6]
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 ...
The outcome of evolution is not a perfectly designed organism. The end products of natural selection are organisms that are adapted to their present environments. Natural selection does not involve progress towards an ultimate goal. Evolution does not strive for more advanced, more intelligent, or more sophisticated life forms. [25]
These populations overlapped with one another to some extent until only about 40,000 years ago, when the archaic humans disappeared from the fossil record. Modern humans had already begun ...
Marston [113] [114] has argued that, although the creationism argument (that because evolution is "merely" a theory, it therefore cannot also be a fact) reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the concepts, the scientific countering of the creationist position by the simple stipulation that evolution is a fact may be counterproductive; a ...
Anaximander's hypothesis could be considered "evolution" in a sense, although not a Darwinian one. [10] Empedocles argued that what we call birth and death in animals are just the mingling and separations of elements which cause the countless "tribes of mortal things". [11]