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On the Origin of Species (or, more completely, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) [3] is a work of scientific literature by Charles Darwin that is considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. It was published on 24 November 1859. [4]
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept ...
Thomas Huxley, one of the small group with whom Darwin had shared his theory before publication, emerged as the main public champion of evolution. He wrote a favourable review of "Origin" in The Times in December 1859, [13] along with several other articles and delivered a lecture at the Royal Institution in February 1860. [14]
Darwin's ideas developed rapidly from the return in 1836 of the Beagle survey expedition. By December 1838 he had developed the principles of his theory. At that time similar ideas brought others disgrace and association with the revolutionary mob. He was conscious of the need to answer all likely objections before publishing.
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 ...
Scientists now have a good understanding of the origin of new species and have observed the speciation process in the laboratory and in the wild. Evolution is the principal scientific theory that biologists use to understand life and is used in many disciplines, including medicine , psychology , conservation biology , anthropology , forensics ...
Species go extinct constantly as environments change, as organisms compete for environmental niches, and as genetic mutation leads to the rise of new species from older ones. At long irregular intervals, Earth's biosphere suffers a catastrophic die-off, a mass extinction , [ 9 ] often comprising an accumulation of smaller extinction events over ...
The lectures published in this collection explore the main topics discussed in Ernst Mayr's Systematics and the Origin of Species from the Viewpoint of a Zoologist. [2] These topics include reproductive isolation, the modern species concept, genomics, and other related subjects within evolutionary biology. [10]