Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Research documenting speciation is abundant. Biologists have documented numerous examples of speciation in nature—with evolution having produced far more species than any observer would consider necessary. For example, there are well over 350,000 described species of beetles. [216]
Animal coloration provided important early evidence for evolution by natural selection, at a time when little direct evidence was available. Three major functions of coloration were discovered in the second half of the 19th century, and subsequently used as evidence of selection: camouflage (protective coloration); mimicry , both Batesian and ...
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]
Cave paintings (such as this one from France) represent a benchmark in the evolutionary history of human cognition. Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin was the first to propose the out-of-Africa hypothesis for the peopling of the world, [39] but the story of prehistoric human migration is now understood to be much more complex thanks to twenty-first-century advances in genomic sequencing.
Darwinian evolution by natural selection is pervasive in literature, whether taken optimistically in terms of how humanity may evolve towards perfection, or pessimistically in terms of the dire consequences of the interaction of human nature and the struggle for survival.
Evolution does not strive for more advanced, more intelligent, or more sophisticated life forms. [25] For example, fleas (wingless parasites) are descended from a winged, ancestral scorpionfly, and snakes are lizards that no longer require limbs—although pythons still grow tiny structures that are the remains of their ancestor's hind legs.
Alternatives to Darwinian evolution have been proposed by scholars investigating biology to explain signs of evolution and the relatedness of different groups of living things. The alternatives in question do not deny that evolutionary changes over time are the origin of the diversity of life, nor that the organisms alive today share a common ...
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 ...