Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 which had developed from medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, and that fit well with natural theology; and ...
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's 1809 evolutionary theory, transmutation of species, was based on a progressive (orthogenetic) drive toward greater complexity. Lamarck also shared the belief, common at the time, that characteristics acquired during an organism's life could be inherited by the next generation, producing adaptation to the environment ...
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 ...
[102] [103] In some countries, creationist beliefs (or a lack of support for evolutionary theory) are relatively widespread, even garnering a majority of public opinion. A study published in Science compared attitudes about evolution in the United States, 32 European countries, and Japan .
The history of the debate from a critic's perspective is detailed by Gannon (2002). [2] Critics of evolutionary psychology include the philosophers of science David Buller (author of Adapting Minds), [3] Robert C. Richardson (author of Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology), [4] and Brendan Wallace (author of Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won't Work).
Evolutionism is a term used (often derogatorily) to denote the theory of evolution. Its exact meaning has changed over time as the study of evolution has progressed. In the 19th century, it was used to describe the belief that organisms deliberately improved themselves through progressive inherited change (orthogenesis).
A recent Gallup poll regarding American views on creation and evolution returned some unprecedented results. Poll: Beliefs in divine creation over evolution hit all-time low in US Skip to main content
The belief in the power of science amongst biologists was running especially high: One of the prominent creators of the modern evolutionary synthesis, Julian Huxley, made a religion of humanism, saying that a "drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered ...