Introduction to Evolution

“The Great Chain Of Being”

An idea from ancient Greece that life is arranged from lowly to more God-like, with us closest to God

Archbishop Ussher (1581-1656)

Said the world was created in 4004 BC. On October 23, 4004 BC (about 6000 years ago0, Adam and Eve were driven from paradise and Noah’s ark landed on Mount Ararat after the flood.

Karl Linnaeus (1700’s)

Was influential in naming and classifying organisms. Saw his work as a divine mission to appreciate the glory of creation to him.

Modern evolutionary biology says: 

We are related to all life on earth 

Georges Cuvier ( French Anatomist, 1700s)

Studied fossils as the remains of living things. Believed they did not evolve, but were created suddenly by God and destroyed in sudden events like Noah’s Flood.

Cuvier’s idea of “Catastrophism”

• The history of life was mainly long periods of stability, interrupted by sudden upheavals

• Some forms of life vanished, and new ones appeared after the upheavals

Creationist

Many people felt that biblical creation and noahs flood explain most landfills and fossils

Charles Lyell ( 1797-1875)

Proposed the idea of “ uniformitarianism”

Uniformitarianism

• The laws of science don’t change

• Today’s natural processes (erosian, gravity,etc) also operated in the past at the same rates and intensities

• So you can use modern processes to explain past events

Homology 

Homology structures may look different but they arose from the same original structure (human arm, cat leg, bat wing) 

Vestigial Structures

Reduced and often useless leftovers of once functional features from previous ancestors ( a whales pelvis is leftover from earlier ancestors who had four legs)

Vertebrate Embryos

development is also similar among diffrent species with vestigiak features in the early stages due to relatedness (tails, partly formed gill slits, etc)

our appendix is mostly…

vestigial, the main use of an appendix is for prolonged digestion of vegetable matter