Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Evolutionary epistemology refers to three distinct topics: (1) the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, (2) a theory that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection, and (3) the study of the historical discovery of new abstract entities such as abstract number or abstract value that necessarily precede the individual acquisition and usage of such abstractions.
[3] [2] Through this adaptation process, cultures form new traits called "inventions," and new items are made available from outside cultures through "diffusion." [ 3 ] While each anthropologist's theory regarding multilineal evolution has varied slightly, most agreed that no specific evolutionary changes are experienced by all cultures ...
Stephen Jay Gould (/ ɡ uː l d / GOOLD; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science.He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. [1]
One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought. Kenneth R. Miller (2000). Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution. Kenneth R. Miller (2008). Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul.
Several writers anticipated evolutionary aspects of Darwin's theory, and in the third edition of On the Origin of Species published in 1861 Darwin named those he knew about in an introductory appendix, An Historical Sketch of the Recent Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species, which he expanded in later editions. [88]
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 following approaches can all be seen as exemplifying a generalization of Darwinian ideas outside of their original domain of biology. These "Darwinian extensions" can be grouped in two categories, depending on whether they discuss implications of biological (genetic) evolution in other disciplines (e.g. medicine or psychology), or discuss processes of variation and selection of entities ...
Charles Darwin's 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, convinced most biologists that evolution had occurred, but not that natural selection was its primary mechanism. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, variations of Lamarckism (inheritance of acquired characteristics), orthogenesis (progressive evolution), saltationism (evolution by jumps) and mutationism (evolution driven by mutations ...