Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
Lima-de-Faria's major problem with natural selection seems to be that it is not Popperian enough. The term is abstract and the concept is impossible to prove with a controlled scientific experiment; as Lima-de-Faria states it 'Selection cannot be weighed or poured into a vial. As such it is not a component of the mechanism of evolution' (pp. 7 ...
For example, evolutionists like Edward Drinker Cope believed in a combination of theistic evolution, Lamarckism, vitalism, and orthogenesis, [88] represented by the sequence of arrows on the extreme left of the diagram. The various alternatives to Darwinian evolution by natural selection were not necessarily mutually exclusive.
The authors' central argument against the concept of natural selection is what they call "the problem of selection-for". [7] An extension of Gould and Lewontin's concept of spandrels, the authors note that certain traits of organisms always come together. The authors give examples: A heart both pumps blood and makes heart-like noises [8]
The term natural selection is most often defined to operate on heritable traits, because these directly participate in evolution. However, natural selection is "blind" in the sense that changes in phenotype can give a reproductive advantage regardless of whether or not the trait is heritable.
The problem statement is therefore that the alleles in question are not particularly beneficial under the previous circumstances; but a change in environment favors these genes by natural selection. The individuals without the genes are therefore disfavored, and the favorable genes spread in the population by the death (or lowered fertility) of ...
The following approaches can all be seen as exemplifying a generalization of Darwinian ideas outside of their original domain of biology. These "Darwinian extensions" can be grouped in two categories, depending on whether they discuss implications of biological (genetic) evolution in other disciplines (e.g. medicine or psychology), or discuss processes of variation and selection of entities ...
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.