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The very idea of an ordering of organisms, even if supposedly fixed, laid the basis for the idea of transmutation of species, whether progressive goal-directed orthogenesis or Charles Darwin's undirected theory of evolution. [20] [21] The chain of being continued to be part of metaphysics in 19th-century education, and the concept was well known.
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept ...
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
The Great Filter is the idea that, in the development of life from the earliest stages of abiogenesis to reaching the highest levels of development on the Kardashev scale, there is a barrier to development that makes detectable extraterrestrial life exceedingly rare. [1] [2] The Great Filter is one possible resolution of the Fermi paradox. The ...
Edward Hitchcock's fold-out paleontological chart in his 1840 Elementary Geology. Although tree-like diagrams have long been used to organise knowledge, and although branching diagrams known as claves ("keys") were omnipresent in eighteenth-century natural history, it appears that the earliest tree diagram of natural order was the 1801 "Arbre botanique" (Botanical Tree) of the French ...
Othniel C. Marsh, America's first palaeontologist, was the first to provide solid fossil evidence to support Darwin's theory of evolution by unearthing the ancestors of the modern horse. [169] In 1877, Marsh delivered a very influential speech before the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, providing a ...
According to Axe, the research he provides with his book disproves Darwin's theory of evolution, revealing "a gaping hole has been at its center from the beginning." Click through 10 books that ...
Darwin's first sketch of an evolutionary tree from his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (1837). Charles Darwin became a naturalist at a point in the history of evolutionary thought when theories of Transmutation were being developed to explain discrepancies in the established faith based explanations of species.