The document discusses several theories of human evolution:
- Creationism is the belief that the universe and life were created by God as described in the Bible.
- Catastrophism holds that geological periods ended with violent natural disasters like floods that wiped out existing lifeforms.
- Transformism explains the appearance of living beings through natural causes alone without direction or purpose.
- Natural selection is the mechanism by which heritable traits that increase survival and reproduction become more common in a population over generations. Variations arise randomly but those conferring advantages are selected for.
The document discusses several theories of human evolution:
- Creationism is the belief that the universe and life were created by God as described in the Bible.
- Catastrophism holds that geological periods ended with violent natural disasters like floods that wiped out existing lifeforms.
- Transformism explains the appearance of living beings through natural causes alone without direction or purpose.
- Natural selection is the mechanism by which heritable traits that increase survival and reproduction become more common in a population over generations. Variations arise randomly but those conferring advantages are selected for.
The document discusses several theories of human evolution:
- Creationism is the belief that the universe and life were created by God as described in the Bible.
- Catastrophism holds that geological periods ended with violent natural disasters like floods that wiped out existing lifeforms.
- Transformism explains the appearance of living beings through natural causes alone without direction or purpose.
- Natural selection is the mechanism by which heritable traits that increase survival and reproduction become more common in a population over generations. Variations arise randomly but those conferring advantages are selected for.
The document discusses several theories of human evolution:
- Creationism is the belief that the universe and life were created by God as described in the Bible.
- Catastrophism holds that geological periods ended with violent natural disasters like floods that wiped out existing lifeforms.
- Transformism explains the appearance of living beings through natural causes alone without direction or purpose.
- Natural selection is the mechanism by which heritable traits that increase survival and reproduction become more common in a population over generations. Variations arise randomly but those conferring advantages are selected for.
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THEORIES OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
Creationism Creationism is the religious belief that the Universe and life originated "from specific acts of divine creation." For young Earth creationists, this includes a biblical literalist interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative and the rejection of the scientific theory of evolution. As the history of evolutionary thought developed from the 18th century on, various views aimed at reconciling the Abrahamic and Genesis with biology and other sciences developed in Western culture. Those holding that species had been created separately (such as Philip Gosse in 1857) were generally called "advocates of creation" but were also called "creationists," as in private correspondence between Charles Darwin and his friends. As the controversy developed over time, the term "anti-evolutionists" became common. In 1929 in the United States, the term "creationism" first became associated with Christian fundamentalists, specifically with their rejection of human evolution and belief in a young Earth although this usage was contested by other groups, such as old Earth creationists and evolutionary creationists, who hold different concepts of creation, such as the acceptance of the age of the Earth and biological evolution as understood by the scientific community.
Catastrophism Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. This was in contrast to uniformitarianism (sometimes described as gradualism), in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, created all the Earth's geological features. Uniformitarianism held that the present is the key to the past, and that all things continued as they were from the indefinite past. Since the early disputes, a more inclusive and integrated view of geologic events has developed, in which the scientific consensus accepts that there were some catastrophic events in the geologic past, but these were explicable as extreme examples of natural processes which can occur. Catastrophism held that geological epochs had ended with violent and sudden natural catastrophes such as great floods and the rapid formation of major mountain chains. Plants and animals living in the parts of the world where such events occurred were killed off, being replaced abruptly by the new forms whose fossils defined the geological strata. Some catastrophists attempted to relate at least one such change to the Biblical account of Noah's flood. The concept was first popularized by the early 19th-century French scientist Georges Cuvier, who proposed that new life forms had moved in from other areas after local floods, and avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings.
TRANSFORMISM
Transformism is a mechanistic doctrine which explains the appearance of living
beings by the sole action of natural causes, working without any kind of direction, and without any end in view.
Natural selection Natural selection is one of the basic mechanisms of evolution, along with mutation, migration, and genetic drift. Darwin's grand idea of evolution by natural selection is relatively simple but often misunderstood. To find out how it works, imagine a population of beetles:
1. There is variation in traits.
For example, some beetles are green and some are
brown.
2. There is differential reproduction.
Since the environment can't support unlimited population growth, not all individuals get to their full potential. In this example, green beetles tend to get eaten by bi to reproduce less often than brown beetles do.
3. There is heredity. The surviving brown beetles have brown baby beetles
4. End result: The more advantageous trait, brown coloration, which offspring, becomes more common in the population. If individuals in the population will be brown.
because this tra
allows the beet
this process co
If you have variation, differential reproduction, and heredity, you will have evolution by natural selection as an outcome. It is as simple as that.
The Process of Natural Selection
Darwins process of natural selection has four components. 1. Variation. Organisms (within populations) exhibit individual variation in appearance and behavior. These variations may involve body size, hair color, facial markings, voice properties, or number of offspring. On the other hand, some traits show little to no variation among individualsfor example, number of eyes in vertebrates. 2. Inheritance. Some traits are consistently passed on from parent to offspring. Such traits are heritable, whereas other traits are strongly influenced by environmental conditions and show weak heritability. 3. High rate of population growth. Most populations have more offspring each year than local resources can support leading to a struggle for resources. Each generation experiences substantial mortality. 4. Differential survival and reproduction. Individuals possessing traits well suited for the struggle for local resources will contribute more offspring to the next generation. From one generation to the next, the struggle for resources (what Darwin called the struggle for existence) will favor individuals with some variations over others and thereby change the frequency of traits within the population. This process is natural selection. The traits that confer an advantage to those individuals who leave more offspring are called adaptations. In order for natural selection to operate on a trait, the trait must possess heritable variation and must confer an advantage in the competition for resources. If one of these requirements does not occur, then the trait does not experience natural selection. (We now know that such traits may change by other evolutionary mechanisms that have been discovered since Darwins time.) Natural selection operates by comparative advantage, not an absolute standard of design. as natural selection acts by competition for resources, it adapts the inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their associates (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859). During the twentieth century, genetics was integrated with Darwins mechanism, allowing us to evaluate natural selection as the differential survival and reproduction of genotypes, corresponding to particular phenotypes. Natural selection can only work on existing variation within a population. Such variations arise by mutation, a change in some part of the genetic code for a trait. Mutations arise by chance and without foresight for the potential advantage or disadvantage of the mutation. In other words, variations do not arise because they are needed.
