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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.
The age of the Earth is about 4.5 billion years. [1] [2] [3] The earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates from at least 3.5 billion years ago. [4] [5] [6] Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life (covered instead by abiogenesis), but it does explain how early lifeforms evolved into the complex ecosystem that we see ...
Neutral theory – Theory of evolution by changes at the molecular level; Shifting balance theory – One version of the theory of evolution; Price equation – Description of how a trait or gene changes in frequency over time; Coefficient of relationship – Mathematical guess about inbreeding; Fitness – Expected reproductive success
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 ...
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]
Darwinism subsequently referred to the specific concepts of natural selection, the Weismann barrier, or the central dogma of molecular biology. [2] Though the term usually refers strictly to biological evolution, creationists have appropriated it to refer to the origin of life or to cosmic evolution, that are distinct to biological evolution, [3] and therefore consider it to be the belief and ...
Fisher's principle is also a precursor to evolutionary game theory. R.H. MacArthur (1965) first suggested applying to sex ratios the language of game theory, [7] and this was subsequently picked up by W.D. Hamilton (1967) who termed the equilibrium point the "unbeatable strategy". [3]
The Trivers–Willard hypothesis has been applied to resource differences among individuals in a society as well as to resource differences among societies.Investigations in humans pose a number of practical and methodological difficulties, [6] but while a 2007 review of previous research found that empirical evidence for the hypothesis was mixed, the author noted that it received greater ...