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By the end of May, Darwin's health had failed again, but after a week's hydrotherapy he was able to start correcting the proofs. He struggled on despite rarely being able to write free of stomach pains for more than twenty minutes at a stretch, and made drastic revisions which left Murray with a huge £72 bill for corrections.
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
Darwin's theory of evolution is based on key facts and the inferences drawn from them, which biologist Ernst Mayr summarised as follows: [6] Every species is fertile enough that if all offspring survived to reproduce, the population would grow (fact). Despite periodic fluctuations, populations remain roughly the same size (fact).
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 ...
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 ...
The hominoids are descendants of a common ancestor.. Homo sapiens is a distinct species of the hominid family of primates, which also includes all the great apes. [1] Over their evolutionary history, humans gradually developed traits such as bipedalism, dexterity, and complex language, [2] as well as interbreeding with other hominins (a tribe of the African hominid subfamily), [3] indicating ...
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]
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]