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The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (2002) is Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould's technical book on macroevolution and the historical development of evolutionary theory. [1] The book was twenty years in the making, [2] published just two months before Gould's death. [3] Aimed primarily at professionals, [4] the volume is divided into ...
The evolutionary biologists Kenneth McNamara and Michael McKinney stated in 2005 that of all the books that Gould wrote in his career, "the one with the most impact is probably Ontogeny and Phylogeny... to say that this work is a hallmark in this area of evolutionary theory would be an understatement.
The theory proposes that most evolution is characterized by long periods of evolutionary stability, infrequently punctuated by swift periods of branching speciation. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism , the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record.
Evolution provides the field of biology with a solid scientific base. The significance of evolutionary theory is summarised by Theodosius Dobzhansky as "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." [78] [79] Nevertheless, the theory of evolution is not static. There is much discussion within the scientific community ...
The complexity distribution is bounded at one side (a living organism cannot be much simpler than bacteria), so an unbiased random walk by evolution, sometimes going in the complexity direction and sometimes going towards simplicity (without having an intrinsic preference to either), will create a distribution with a small, but longer and ...
Modern evolutionary theory continues to develop. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, with its tree-like model of branching common descent, has become the unifying theory of the life sciences. The theory explains the diversity of living organisms and their adaptation to the environment.
In the so-called modern synthesis of the early 20th century, between 1918 and 1930 Ronald Fisher brought together Darwin's theory of evolution, with its insistence on natural selection, heredity, and variation, and Gregor Mendel's laws of genetics into a coherent structure for evolutionary biology. Biologists assumed that an organism was a ...
(p. 78) Gould sees morphological stability as "probably explained by constraints on the supply of variation to selection". (p. 78) But whereas in his earlier work Gould considered variation supply as a brake on evolutionary change, in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory he carefully notes that it can also enhance possibilities for change. "So ...