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Recurring cultural, political, and theological rejection of evolution by religious groups [a] exists regarding the origins of the Earth, of humanity, and of other life. In accordance with creationism, species were once widely believed to be fixed products of divine creation, but since the mid-19th century, evolution by natural selection has been established by the scientific community as an ...
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 ...
The position of the Roman Catholic Church on the theory of evolution has changed over the last two centuries from a large period of no official mention, to a statement of neutrality in the early-1950s, to limited guarded acceptance in recent years, rejecting the materialistic and reductionist philosophies behind it, and insisting that the human ...
The theory of evolution by natural selection has also been adopted as a foundation for various ethical and social systems, such as social Darwinism, an idea that preceded the publication of The Origin of Species, popular in the 19th century, which holds that "the survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined in 1851 by Herbert Spencer, [1] 8 years before Darwin published his theory of evolution ...
Cope's complex set of beliefs thus assembled five evolutionary philosophies: recapitulationism, orthogenesis, theistic evolution, Lamarckism, and vitalism. [88] Other palaeontologists and field naturalists continued to hold beliefs combining orthogenesis and Lamarckism until the modern synthesis in the 1930s. [89]
The history of the debate from a critic's perspective is detailed by Gannon (2002). [10] Critics of evolutionary psychology include the philosophers of science David Buller (author of Adapting Minds), [11] Robert C. Richardson (author of Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology), [12] and Brendan Wallace (author of Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won't Work).
Nonetheless, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. The two main schools of thought hold: either that religion evolved due to natural selection and has selective advantage; or that religion is an evolutionary byproduct of other mental adaptations.
The evolutionary psychology of religion is the study of religious belief using evolutionary psychology principles. It is one approach to the psychology of religion.As with all other organs and organ functions, the brain's functional structure is argued to have a genetic basis, and is therefore subject to the effects of natural selection and evolution.