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Dec 14, 2011 · There is, indeed, considerable evidence that at least some non-acceptance of evolution is due to lack of adequate familiarity with and/or understanding of the “facts”—the evidence that evolution itself has occurred and/or what modern evolutionary theory actually claims.
- Warren D. Allmon
- wda1@cornell.edu
- 2011
Jul 1, 2002 · 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense. Opponents of evolution want to make a place for creationism by tearing down real science, but their arguments don't hold up. By John Rennie.
Supporters of Darwin’s theory often seek to portray those who doubt evolution as being moved by strictly religious or political motivations. The Scientific Dissent from Darwinism List shows that many objections to Darwinian evolution are scientifically based.
- Overview
- Correct: How natural selection works within species
- Correct: How natural selection creates new species, generally speaking
- Correct: Darwin’s lines of evidence to support the theory
- Incorrect: Earth’s age
- Incorrect: The mechanisms of variation among individuals
(Read T. H. Huxley’s 1875 Britannica essay on evolution & biology.)
Anagenesis is the technical term for an evolutionary change in a group in which one species replaces another but branching into separate species does not take place. It can be argued that as a species travels through time, it continually adapts to its environment. The traits of individuals that do not survive long enough to reproduce fade from the ...
Speciation, the creation of new and distinct species in the course of evolution, is simply an extension of anagenesis, but with branching allowed. Speciation also involves natural selection, but it is most easily seen in populations. If one or more populations are isolated from the rest of a species over many generations (and members of each isolat...
One of the hallmarks of good theory construction is the use of separate lines of evidence as proof. To lend support to his theory of natural selection, Darwin took examples from biogeography, paleontology, embryology, and morphology. He noted several examples of “closely-allied species” (that is, closely related species that likely descended or branched off from a common parent species) inhabiting the same territory or adjacent territories. He noted that different zebra species were found together on the plains of East Africa and, in perhaps his most famous example, that several living species of Galapagos finches co-occurred in the Galapagos Islands—a cluster of isolated islands in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The pattern of such closely related species in space supported the idea that these species had a similar origin. Darwin also noticed patterns of closely related species clustering in time. The fossil record showed several examples of similar-looking species occurring next to one another in the same layer or in successive layers of rock. Evidence of the influence of natural selection also appeared in developing embryos, where structures observed during the early stages of development of the higher vertebrates (fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) resembled the structures of more-primitive animals.
Darwin also leveraged morphology (that is, the general aspects of biological form and arrangement of the parts of a plant or an animal) to support his theory. Taxonomy, the classification of different forms of life, is rooted in the observable traits that group individual living things into species, genus, family, and so on. Generally speaking, the more traits different forms of life share, the closer their evolutionary relationship is. Through the process of taxonomy (which involves comparing the observable traits of living forms with the same kinds of traits in fossils), one can develop a decent understanding of the ways different lines of plants, animals, and other forms of life emerged across time.
During the 19th century the Bible (not the fossil record) was widely considered the primary authority on Earth’s age. It held that Earth was only about 6,000 years old. Most scientists of the time, however, acknowledged that Earth was certainly older. By the early 1860s, just a few years after On the Origin of Species was published, Scottish engine...
Although Darwin’s theory of natural selection was basically correct, in the late 1860s he proposed a theory that was very wrong. That theory—”pangenesis”—was an attempt to explain variation among individuals in a species. Offspring in sexual species display a mix of traits from both of their parents. Siblings look different from one another, but th...
- John P. Rafferty
Simmons dissects the theory of evolution from the perspective of a medical doctor, giving compelling reasons why evolution cannot explain many aspects of the human body.
The theory of evolution is a difficult concept and misconceptions abound. The factual nature of evolution is often challenged by wrongly associating the scientific meaning of a theory with the vernacular meaning.
People also ask
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Jun 16, 2015 · Further, we examined the relationship between trust in science and three contexts of evolution: microevolution, macroevolution, and human evolution, to determine if the relationship changed when different facets of evolution acceptance were considered.
