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[5] [8] While the essay argues (following de Chardin) that Christianity and evolutionary biology are compatible, a position described as evolutionary creation or theistic evolution, the phrase is also used by those who consider that "in biology" includes anthropology, and those who consider a creator to be unnecessary, such as Richard Dawkins ...
Evolution provides the field of biology with a solid scientific base. The significance of evolutionary theory is summarised by Theodosius Dobzhansky as "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." [78] [79] Nevertheless, the theory of evolution is not static. There is much discussion within the scientific community ...
A prominent question in the philosophy of biology is whether biology can be reduced to lower-level sciences such as chemistry and physics. Materialism is the view that every biological system including organisms consists of nothing except the interactions of molecules; it is opposed to vitalism.
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
The mediaeval great chain of being as a staircase, implying the possibility of progress: [1] Ramon Lull's Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Mind, 1305. Alternatives to Darwinian evolution have been proposed by scholars investigating biology to explain signs of evolution and the relatedness of different groups of living things.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a 1902 collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin.The essays, initially published in the English periodical The Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896, [1] explore the role of mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity (or "mutual aid") in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and ...
The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism—often expressed using Ernst Haeckel's phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—is a historical hypothesis that the development of the embryo of an animal, from fertilization to gestation or hatching (), goes through stages resembling or representing successive adult stages in the evolution of the ...
Inputs to the modern synthesis, with other topics (inverted colours) such as developmental biology that were not joined with evolutionary biology until the turn of the 21st century [103] Biologists, alongside scholars of the history and philosophy of biology, have continued to debate the need for, and possible nature of, a replacement synthesis.