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Research on the Aha! moment dates back more than 100 years, to the Gestalt psychologists' first experiments on chimpanzee cognition. [9] In his 1921 book, [9] Wolfgang Köhler described the first instance of insightful thinking in animals: One of his chimpanzees, Sultan, was presented with the task of reaching a banana that had been strung up high on the ceiling so that it was impossible to ...
Convergent evolution—the repeated evolution of similar traits in multiple lineages which all ancestrally lack the trait—is rife in nature, as illustrated by the examples below. The ultimate cause of convergence is usually a similar evolutionary biome , as similar environments will select for similar traits in any species occupying the same ...
[1] [2] [3] The earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates from at least 3.5 billion years ago. [4] [5] [6] Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life (covered instead by abiogenesis), but it does explain how early lifeforms evolved into the complex ecosystem that we see today. [7]
Mosaic evolution – Evolution of characters at various rates both within and between species; Parallel evolution – Similar evolution in distinct species; Quantum evolution – Evolution where transitional forms are particularly unstable and do not last long; Recurrent evolution – The repeated evolution of a particular character
The idea of evolution by natural selection was proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, but evolutionary biology, as an academic discipline in its own right, emerged during the period of the modern synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s. [8] It was not until the 1980s that many universities had departments of evolutionary biology.
The great apes (Hominidae) show some cognitive and empathic abilities. Chimpanzees can make tools and use them to acquire foods and for social displays; they have mildly complex hunting strategies requiring cooperation, influence and rank; they are status conscious, manipulative and capable of deception; they can learn to use symbols and understand aspects of human language including some ...
Explanation of current form in terms of a historical sequence. Current Form. Explanation of the current form of species. How vs. Why Questions: Proximate. How an individual organism's structures function Ontogeny. Developmental explanations for changes in individuals, from DNA to their current form Mechanism
As the gaps in the fossil record had been used as an argument against Darwin's gradualist evolution, de Beer's explanation supported the Darwinian position. [23] However, despite de Beer, the modern synthesis largely ignored embryonic development to explain the form of organisms, since population genetics appeared to be an adequate explanation ...