Major Themes in the Theory of Evolution
The world around us changes. This simple fact is obvious everywhere we look. Streams wash dirt and stones from higher places to lower places. Untended gardens fill with weeds.
Other changes are more gradual but much more dramatic when viewed over long time scales. Powerful telescopes reveal new stars coalescing from galactic dust, just as our sun did more than 4.5 billion years ago. The earth itself formed shortly thereafter, when rock, dust, and gas circling the sun condensed into the planets of our solar system. Fossils of primitive microorganisms show that life had emerged on earth by about 3.8 billion years ago.
Similarly, the fossil record reveals profound changes in the kinds of living things that have inhabited our planet over its long history. Trilobites that populated the seas hundreds of millions of years ago no longer crawl about. Mammals now live in a world that was once dominated by reptilian giants such as Tyrannosaurus rex. More than 99 percent of the species that have ever lived on the earth are now extinct, either because all of the members of the species died, the species evolved into a new species, or it split into two or more new species.
The Hubble Space Telescope
has revealed many astronomical
phenomena that ground-based
telescopes cannot see. The
images at right show disks of
matter around young stars
that could give rise to planets.
In the image below, stars are
forming in the tendrils of gas
and dust extending from a
gigantic nebula.
Many kinds of cumulative change through time have been described by the term "evolution," and the term is used in astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, and other sciences. This document focuses o...
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years ” (Quimby 2), since this epoch involved the fundamental evolution of mankind to the present. It is important to
Life changes, which leads humans to change, some changes are little others are dramatic, some
Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition ; ed. by Philip Appleman; copyright 1979, 1970 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Anyone with even a moderate background in science has heard of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. Since the publishing of his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, Darwin’s ideas have been debated by everyone from scientists to theologians to ordinary lay-people. Today, though there is still severe opposition, evolution is regarded as fact by most of the scientific community and Darwin’s book remains one of the most influential ever written.
Work Cited Colby, Chris. A. Web. " An Introduction to Evolutionary Biology." 28 August 2015.
Miller, Kenneth R, and Gould, Stephen Jay. (1984) Science and Creationism. Ed. Ashley Montagu. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Charles Darwin was a man of science. He had a true passion for all things involving both plants and animals. Darwin made many contributions to the field of science, but his main contribution that he is most well-known for involves his theories of evolution, or more specifically, how species tend to change over long periods of time through a process called natural selection. Natural selection is defined by Darwin as the “preservation of favorable variations and the rejections of injurious variations“ (Jacobus 900). Even though many of his theories have now been embraced by the scientific community as natural laws in motion, much controversy remains over whether or not his ideas should be perceived as true scientific law. Despite the discoveries of overwhelming amounts of evidence, many people still believe that evolution is exactly what Darwin called it—a theory, and nothing more.
The ongoing scientific investigation of how exactly evolution occurred and continues to occur has been an argumentative idea amongst society since Darwin first articulated it over a century ago. The scientific basis of evolution accounts for happenings that are also essential concerns of religion; both religion and science focus on the origins of humans and of biological diversity. For instance, in the reading “Truth Cannot Contradict Truth,” Pope John Paul II, addressing the Pontifical Academy of Science, discussed the matter of God as creator of man. The Pope explains that men cannot relate to animals because men are superior. The reasoning for that is because God created humans under his likeness. What the church is saying about mankind contradicts with the scientific evidence scientists have found on human evolution. By analyzing the different scientific approaches, one will be able to grasp a clear understanding that the theory of evolution by natural selection conflicts with the Judeo-Christian worldview of God as creator.
In the 1960’s, Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service, who were both students and colleagues of Leslie White and Julian Steward, wanted to find a resolution over this debate between unilineal evolution and multilinear evolution. Sahlins and Service concluded that cultural evolution can be seen as two different dimensions known as specific evolution and general evolution. (Erickson 1998:119) Specific evolution refers to the particular sequence of change and adaptation of a particular society in a given environment. (Ember 2011:23)
...criterion that true science is progressive. It has proven able to successfully account for apparent anomalies and generate novel predictions and explanations and therefore has the hallmarks of a currently progressive research program capable of providing us with new knowledge of how the mind works (Ketellar and Ellis 2000). A glance at the Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (2005), edited by David Buss, shows just how vigorous and productive the field is. Important challenges remain in the discipline, however. The most important are determining the role of domain-specific versus domain-general processes and integrating evolutionary psychology with other behavioral sciences like genetics, neuroscience, and psychometrics (Buss 2004; Rice 2011). Even though critics will remain, Evolutionary Psychology will remain as a scientific discipline for the foreseeable future.
The thought of evolution is filled with theories, ideas and beliefs. The definition of evolution is rather simple. According to Jerry A. Coyle, evolution is “the change in the inherited characteristics of biological populations over successive generations (2). Evolution gives rise to diversity when it comes to the hierarchy of life otherwise known as biological organization. Many people find the topic of evolution to be troubling and very confusing. Throughout history churches have preached that evolution is atheistic and a sin if even thought about. Famous scientist, Charles Darwin, is said to really be the first to formulate debated theory of evolution by the means of natural selection. Eventually in the 20th century genetics was compounded with Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution. Even today scientists continue to study different aspects of the theory of evolution.
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Without evolution, and the constant ever changing environment, the complexity of living organisms would not be as it is. Evolution is defined as a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations (8).Scientists believe in the theory of evolution. This belief is based on scientific evidence that corroborates the theory of evolution. In Figure 1 the pictures of the skulls depict the sequence of the evolution of Homo-sapiens. As the figure shows, man has evolved from our common ancestor that is shared by homo-sapiens. The change of diet of homo-sapiens over time has thought to contribute to the change in jaw structure and overall skull shape.