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In science and history, consilience (also convergence of evidence or concordance of evidence) is the principle that evidence from independent, unrelated sources can "converge" on strong conclusions. That is, when multiple sources of evidence are in agreement, the conclusion can be very strong even when none of the individual sources of evidence ...
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge is a 1998 book by the biologist E. O. Wilson, in which the author discusses methods that have been used to unite the sciences and might in the future unite them with the humanities. [1] Wilson uses the term consilience to describe the synthesis of knowledge from different specialized fields of human endeavor.
Evidence from island biogeography has played an important and historic role in the development of evolutionary biology. For purposes of biogeography , islands are divided into two classes. Continental islands are islands like Great Britain , and Japan that have at one time or another been part of a continent.
Common descent is a concept in evolutionary biology applicable when one species is the ancestor of two or more species later in time. According to modern evolutionary biology, all living beings could be descendants of a unique ancestor commonly referred to as the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all life on Earth.
After stepping down, he published more than a dozen books, including a digital biology textbook for the iPad. [ 12 ] [ 94 ] He founded the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, which finances the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and is an "independent foundation" at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University .
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 ...
Such evidence is expected to be empirical evidence and interpretable in accordance with the scientific method. Standards for scientific evidence vary according to the field of inquiry, but the strength of scientific evidence is generally based on the results of statistical analysis and the strength of scientific controls. [citation needed]
Two decades since the first eukaryotes were sequenced, the "biological role" of around 20% of proteins are still unknown. [10] Many of these proteins are conserved across most eukaryotic species and some are conserved in bacteria, indicating a role fundamental for life.