The Natural History of the Galapagos Written by Ian Thornton

1140 Words3 Pages

The theory of evolution is a very interesting, but also a bit of a controversial topic. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines evolution as “a theory that the differences between modern plants and animals are because of changes that happened by a natural process over a very long time.” Even though many people would and have disagreed with this following statement, the theory of evolution as of now is the best the best way of explaining why people and the animals which are, are on earth today.
Like all scientific discoveries the theory of evolution had to be discovered by someone, and this someone’s name was Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin was an English biologist who was born in 1809; he was also a writer and known to be the father of biology. The following is based on the book “The Natural History of the Galapagos,” written by Ian Thornton. Darwin came up with the theory of evolution after he had spent time in the Galapagos Islands. While he was in the Galapagos Islands Darwin had noticed a specific breed of birds, these birds were known as the Galapagos Finches. What Charles had specifically noticed about the Galapagos finches was that the finches were made up of many different species; it was obvious that these birds were all related but each species had a specific variation. For example the birds would have different sized or shaped beaks. From this Darwin noticed that each separate groups of finches had separate habits, specifically eating habits. Charles noticed that the species which he referred to as ground finches were designed to obviously feed on what they could mainly find on the ground such as seeds and insects, also that the tree finches were designed to feed off of higher ground. Finally from all of this he was ...

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Alan Murray 30 December, 2013. 4 April,2014. http://www.pewforum.org/2013/12/30/publics-views-on-human-evolution/
Marques-Bonet, Tomas, et al. "A Burst Of Segmental Duplications In The Genome Of The African Great Ape Ancestor." Nature 457.7231 (2009): 877-881. Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition. Web. 3 Apr. 2014.

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