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The theory still faced criticism mostly due to doubts about how long spores would actually survive under the conditions of their transport from one planet, through space, to another. [25] Despite all the emphasis placed on trying to establish the scientific legitimacy of this theory, it still lacked testability; that was and still is a serious ...
At the most fundamental level, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution states that organisms evolve and adapt to their environment by an iterative process. This process can be conceived as an evolutionary algorithm that searches the space of possible forms (the fitness landscape ) for the ones that are best adapted.
Charles Darwin in 1868. Darwinism is a term used to describe a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others. The theory states that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.
The very idea of an ordering of organisms, even if supposedly fixed, laid the basis for the idea of transmutation of species, whether progressive goal-directed orthogenesis or Charles Darwin's undirected theory of evolution. [20] [21] The chain of being continued to be part of metaphysics in 19th-century education, and the concept was well known.
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]
The Gaia hypothesis (/ ˈ ɡ aɪ. ə /), also known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.
The absurd universe: Our universe just happens to be the way it is. The unique universe: There is a deep underlying unity in physics that necessitates the Universe being the way it is. A Theory of Everything will explain why the various features of the Universe must have exactly the values that have been recorded.
Val Dusek notes that holism contains a continuum of degrees of the top-down control of organization, ranging from monism (the doctrine that the only complete object is the whole universe, or that there is only one entity, the universe) to organicism, which allows relatively more independence of the parts from the whole, despite the whole being ...