Darwin & The Theory of Evolution

BIO1131 - Delcourt

Early Greek philosphers viewed the world as ________ and _________, which is incompatible w ___________

eternal, unchanging, evolution

In the middle age and Renaissance period, scholars adapted ideas to accomodate a ___________ view based on literal interpretations of the _____

Christian, bible

St Thomas Aquinas and William Paley promoted the __________ _________

watchmaker analogy

Watchmaker Analogy

The complex structure of living things + the remarkable adaptations of plants/animals are evidence as the work of an intelligent designer

in the 1600s, systematic classifications were based on:

similarities among organisms

Linnaeus developped a __________ ________ in which organisms are arranged in:

taxonomic system, hierarchical groupings based on similarity (NESTED CLASSIFICATION)

New observations in the 18th century promoted a radical shift among ___________. One of which was that the earth is ______ _____, based on observations of:

geologists, very old; sedimentary rocks that had been laid down under ancient oceans.

Hutton argued that based on how ____ were organized, the length of time necessary for _______ and __________, ________ evidence, all pointed to our world being very old.

strata, erosion, sedimentation, fossil

Lyell argued that existing ________ features can be explained by the same ongoing processes we _______ observe; the missing element is ______!

geological, currently, time!

Uniformitarianism replaced ____________

catastrophism

Uniformitarianism

the same natural laws and processes that operate in our present day scientific observations have always operated the past and apply everywhere in the universe; ie geological processes must have operated over long periods of time slowly and gradually

Cuvier

established the fact of extinction! Compared the anatomy of living things to fossil and determiend that species in the fossil records do not live today.

Mary Anning

Discovered many fossils but wasn’t recognized for it

• the first to discovery the plesiosaurus

• learned paleotology w/o any formal education

• her family collected and solf fossils

Lamark

• first who developed a complete theory of evolution + a mechansimy by which it occurs

• determined that more complex species gradually descend from older, less complex ones

• wrongly suggested that traits acquired during an individual’s lifetime were passed down to their offspring (use and disuse of structures)

Lamark was wrong, but he still had a legacy:

he proposed a mechanism for evolution and he explained adaptation as a fit between organisms and their environment

Along Darwin’s 5 year voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, he read ____’s Principles of Geology. This convinced of:

Lyell, that uniformitarianism rather than catastrophism

Darwin’s observations were inconsistent with ___________, the belief that species were created independently by a divine creator.

creationism

Similar environments can produce similar _____________, but geographic history reflects _________.

adaptations, ancestry

2 main insights of Darwin and Wallace

1. Descent with Modification (common descent) — ie evolution

2. Natural Selection