EVOLUTION - THE BASIC CONCEPT
"So out of the ground, the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name".
Genesis 2:19
"We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe[s] to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act"
Charles Darwin (1859)
The essence of evolution is that all living things on earth, including our own species, began and developed from simple single celled microbes which sparked to life in the oceans or deep within the earth more than 3.5 billion years ago. For over a billion years these primitive bacteria were the only form of life on earth. From these simple beginnings, a myriad of life forms grew, from single cells to multi-celled to complex multicellular organisms to intelligent life. Since not all of the life forms which are born or come into being can possibly survive, the ones that do are the ones which are most adaptable to change, in other words those which are best at adapting to their environment, and all this occurs by blind repetitive processes and small, local interactions with no overall design linking them together and no architect. This is the process known as Natural Selection. Because all living things are descended from the same source, it follows that every species on earth shares an ancestor with every other species, each similar to the next.
Before Charles Darwin presented his evolutionary theory in a systematic way in On the Origin of Species first published in 1859[1], living organisms had existed on this earth, without ever really knowing why, for over 3 thousand million years, and as the eminent zoologist G G Simpson has said, all attempts to answer the question as to how we and our co-inhabitants came to be here before that date are worthless and we will be better off if we ignore them completely.[2]
Darwin himself described his ideas as a “theory”, but this did not mean they were the result of armchair thinking or uncorroborated analysis. These days evolution is accepted by the overwhelming majority of informed, intelligent observers as a fact, because it is corroborated by a rising tide of evidence including the fossil record, modern dating techniques, molecular evidence (DNA) and other evidence besides. “As a result, Darwin’s central ideas have become the fundamental organising principle of modern scientific accounts of the history of life on earth”[3]. It is interesting to note that Darwin himself rarely used the term ‘evolution’ because it seemed to imply some sort of mystical force driving biological change in particular directions, whereas he viewed it as a much more open-ended process[4].
[1] For a study of Darwin’s putative intellectual predecessors including the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, see Rebecca Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts: In search of the first evolutionists, Bloomsbury, 2012. However, many of them were not truly evolutionary in nature, and in the case of others, he knew little or nothing of them at all. However, there is no doubt that his ideas evolved over time, “thanks to the collective efforts of imaginative giants on whose broad shoulders Darwin could stand”: Review “On the origins of a theory”, Peter Spinks, SMH, 21-22 July 2012.
[2] Cited by Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1976, 1989, 1.
[3] David Christian, Maps of Time – An introduction to Big History, University of California Press, London, 2004, 2011, 91.
[4] Ibid, 82.
"So out of the ground, the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name".
Genesis 2:19
"We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe[s] to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act"
Charles Darwin (1859)
The essence of evolution is that all living things on earth, including our own species, began and developed from simple single celled microbes which sparked to life in the oceans or deep within the earth more than 3.5 billion years ago. For over a billion years these primitive bacteria were the only form of life on earth. From these simple beginnings, a myriad of life forms grew, from single cells to multi-celled to complex multicellular organisms to intelligent life. Since not all of the life forms which are born or come into being can possibly survive, the ones that do are the ones which are most adaptable to change, in other words those which are best at adapting to their environment, and all this occurs by blind repetitive processes and small, local interactions with no overall design linking them together and no architect. This is the process known as Natural Selection. Because all living things are descended from the same source, it follows that every species on earth shares an ancestor with every other species, each similar to the next.
Before Charles Darwin presented his evolutionary theory in a systematic way in On the Origin of Species first published in 1859[1], living organisms had existed on this earth, without ever really knowing why, for over 3 thousand million years, and as the eminent zoologist G G Simpson has said, all attempts to answer the question as to how we and our co-inhabitants came to be here before that date are worthless and we will be better off if we ignore them completely.[2]
Darwin himself described his ideas as a “theory”, but this did not mean they were the result of armchair thinking or uncorroborated analysis. These days evolution is accepted by the overwhelming majority of informed, intelligent observers as a fact, because it is corroborated by a rising tide of evidence including the fossil record, modern dating techniques, molecular evidence (DNA) and other evidence besides. “As a result, Darwin’s central ideas have become the fundamental organising principle of modern scientific accounts of the history of life on earth”[3]. It is interesting to note that Darwin himself rarely used the term ‘evolution’ because it seemed to imply some sort of mystical force driving biological change in particular directions, whereas he viewed it as a much more open-ended process[4].
[1] For a study of Darwin’s putative intellectual predecessors including the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, see Rebecca Stott, Darwin’s Ghosts: In search of the first evolutionists, Bloomsbury, 2012. However, many of them were not truly evolutionary in nature, and in the case of others, he knew little or nothing of them at all. However, there is no doubt that his ideas evolved over time, “thanks to the collective efforts of imaginative giants on whose broad shoulders Darwin could stand”: Review “On the origins of a theory”, Peter Spinks, SMH, 21-22 July 2012.
[2] Cited by Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 1976, 1989, 1.
[3] David Christian, Maps of Time – An introduction to Big History, University of California Press, London, 2004, 2011, 91.
[4] Ibid, 82.