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Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution (the idea that species arose through descent with modification from a single common ancestor in a process driven by natural selection) initially met opposition from scientists with different ...
Group selection is a proposed mechanism of evolution in which natural selection acts at the level of the group, instead of at the level of the individual or gene. Early authors such as V. C. Wynne-Edwards and Konrad Lorenz argued that the behavior of animals could affect their survival and reproduction as groups, speaking for instance of ...
Although group selection is commonly thought to be nonexistent or unimportant in genetic evolution, [63] [64] [65] DIT predicts that, due to the nature of cultural inheritance, it may be an important force in cultural evolution. Group selection occurs in cultural evolution because conformist biases make it difficult for novel cultural traits to ...
The word theory in "the theory of evolution" does not imply scientific doubt regarding its validity; the concepts of theory and hypothesis have specific meanings in a scientific context. While theory in colloquial usage may denote a hunch or conjecture, a scientific theory is a set of principles that explains an observable phenomenon in natural ...
By the start of the 20th century, evolution was generally accepted by biologists but natural selection was in eclipse. [2] Many alternative theories were proposed, but biologists were quick to discount theories such as orthogenesis, vitalism and Lamarckism which offered no mechanism for evolution.
Two useful introductions to the fundamental theory underlying the unit of selection issue and debate, which also present examples of multi-level selection from the entire range of the biological hierarchy (typically with entities at level N-1 competing for increased representation, i.e., higher frequency, at the immediately higher level N, e.g., organisms in populations or cell lineages in ...
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.
Introduction to evolution – Non-technical overview of the subject of biological evolution; Evolution – Gradual change in the heritable traits of organisms; Evolution as fact and theory – Discussion of the meaning and usage of the terms evolution, fact and theory