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The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism—often expressed using Ernst Haeckel's phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—is a historical hypothesis that the development of the embryo of an animal, from fertilization to gestation or hatching (), goes through stages resembling or representing successive adult stages in the evolution of the ...
1985. How biology differs from the physical sciences. In D. J. Depew and B H Weber, eds., Evolution at a Crossroads: The New Biology and the New Philosophy of Science, Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, pp. 43–63. 1988. The why and how of species. Biology and Philosophy 3:431–441; 1992. The idea of teleology. Journal of the History of Ideas 53: ...
In biology, evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organization , from kingdoms to species , and individual organisms and molecules , such as DNA and proteins .
The evolution of biological complexity is one important outcome of the process of evolution. [1] Evolution has produced some remarkably complex organisms – although the actual level of complexity is very hard to define or measure accurately in biology, with properties such as gene content, the number of cell types or morphology all proposed as possible metrics.
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.
Therefore, the evolution of the major transitions can also be seen as the framework for studying the evolution of the levels of complexity in biology. [ 9 ] Their work has generated substantial interest and further research into major transitions, [ 10 ] including a devoted issue of papers to the subject in 2016 in the journal Philosophical ...
Orthogenesis, also known as orthogenetic evolution, progressive evolution, evolutionary progress, or progressionism, is an obsolete biological hypothesis that organisms have an innate tendency to evolve in a definite direction towards some goal (teleology) due to some internal mechanism or "driving force".
Megaevolution has been extensively debated because it has been seen as a possible objection to Charles Darwin's theory of gradual evolution by natural selection. [1] A list was prepared by John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry which they called The Major Transitions in Evolution. [2] [3] On the 1999 edition of the list they included: