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Today, scientists agree that all current life descends from earlier life, which has become progressively more complex and diverse through Charles Darwin's mechanism of evolution by natural selection. Darwin wrote to J.D. Hooker on 29 March 1863 stating that "It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think ...
Events in Europe such as the Galileo affair of the early-17th century – associated with the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment – led scholars such as John William Draper to postulate (c. 1874) a conflict thesis, suggesting that religion and science have been in conflict methodologically, factually and politically throughout ...
[112] [113] Also, 85% of God believing Indians who know about evolution agree that life on earth evolved over time as a result of natural selection. [112] In the same 2009 survey carried among 10 major nations, the highest proportion that agreed that evolutionary theories alone should be taught in schools was in India, at 49%. [114] [115]
Gould presents an alternative hypothesis, however, which states that the history of life is better described as "decimation followed by diversification within a few remaining stocks", [4] represented as a pyramid with a wide base of anatomical disparity that becomes increasingly constrained by natural selection and extinction level events as ...
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
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 ...
Many prominent anti-abortion voices have asserted life begins at conception, and argued it's backed by the science. But there isn’t that kind of consensus scientifically or theologically.
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.