Key Fathers Of Evolution Essay

Evolution and natural selection can be summarized by the Oxford definition as the process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring. It hindsight, these definitions may seem somewhat trivial and part of common sense, but the development and understanding of these theories can be significantly more complex and mysterious. These consequences are even important in today’s scientific pursuits as the terms natural selection and evolution are often tossed around without recognizing its implications. For example, many scholars in their own control experiments trivialize and take advantage of the evolutionary theories as justification of their results rather than provide a mechanism of action.

More specifically, we will examine one of the key fathers of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace and his conception of the river barrier hypothesis as a mechanism for the speciation that he observes in the Amazon Basin. The idea is the river was a wide enough vector to introduce enough isolation whether through a reproductive or geographic means to produce separate and favorable species on the opposite banks. This is especially prevalent in the Amazon Basin as it encompasses the most diverse collection of species all relying on this large water source.

Our scientific community has barely scratched upon the true basis of how evolutionary mechanisms have produced the biodiversity we see in the world today. Understanding the river barrier hypothesis and its affect on the Amazon biodiversity would be an important step to recognizing specific mechanisms and the goal of this paper is to understand the development of this theory from its conception by Wallace and assess the related research in the last century. In essence, we want to assess the sufficiency of the argument and how much the physical barrier of the river plays a role in developing genetic