Archive for the ‘What Darwin Said’ Category

Natural selection is Charles Darwin proposed natural mechanism for the origin of new species, as the title implies—On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Natural selection was Darwin’s proposed unifying “natural law of evolution”.

What is the evidence for natural selection? Darwin explains -

In order to make it clear how, as I believe, natural selection acts, I must beg permission to give one or two imaginary illustrations.

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Francis Collins, the past director of the Human Genome Project and current director of the National Institute of Health (NIH), and Charles Darwin have pursued a common cause—a belief in evolution supported by deductive reasoning.

Both Collins and Darwin abandoned the inductive Scientific Method reasoning process to embrace deductive reasoning. Their resulting conclusions on “Junk DNA” and “Natural Selection” are similar.

While the DNA regions not known to code for proteins were thought to be only “Junk DNA” by Collins, Darwin thought that Natural Section was the driving force of evolution. Continue Reading

Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species explains the role of natural selection in evolution: “I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.” The key to evolution is the accumulation of “slight, successive” changes.

In 1995, Edward B. Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, and Eric F. Wieschaus were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on HOX genes. During the 1950’s, geneticist Edward B Lewis discovered the Bithorax complex (BX-C) group of HOX genes in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Continue Reading

Leonid Moroz, professor of neuroscience, chemistry, and biology at the University of Florida College of Medicine, in a recent article published in The Scientist entitled “The Devolution of Evolution,” comments on Theodosius Dobzhansky assertion nearly 40 years ago that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

If Dobzhansky’s assertion is true, “How is it, then”, Moroz asks, “that so few newly minted PhDs in the biological sciences have taken any formal graduate school courses in evolution or biodiversity?” Continue Reading

For Charles Darwin, natural selection was the key natural law driving evolution, as reflected in the title, On the Origin of Species, by Means of Natural Selection. Natural selection was envisioned as the mechanism for the origin of species—evolution.

Darwin declared – “I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.” In essence, natural selection was simply founded on a belief.

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At the time of the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, the topic of evolution was “in the air”, according to Charles Darwin, all 1,250 printed copies of the book were sold on the first day. The Origin of Species delivered a state of evolution critique on other popular theories.

In the nineteenth century, critiques on theories of evolution raged all the way into the chambers of the British Parliament. To resolve the debate the Parliament commissioned of the HMS Challenger, the largest international expedition ever convened, with the task of finding Darwin’s theoretical “innumerable” transitional links.

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In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin describes the process of evolution: “I do believe that natural selection will generally act very slowly, only over long periods of time…. natural selection acts slowly by accumulating slight, successive, favorable variations.”

Australian paleontologist, John A. Long article entitled “Dawn of the Deed”, published in the January 2011 issue of Scientific America, highlights his recent fossil fish findings in the grassy paddocks of the Gogo Station, a vast cattle ranch located in the heart of northwestern Australia.

Surprisingly, Long’s new findings, rather than demonstrating “slight, successive” changes, however, only stands to symbolize fossil record problem, a problem painfully known by Darwin, “The distinctiveness of specific forms and their not being blended together in innumerable transitional links is a very obvious difficulty”.

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Self-organization is hot, once again.

Critical of his own work, in a letter to Hugh Falconer in October 1862, Charles Darwin wrote, “I look at it as absolutely certain that very much in the Origin will be proved to be rubbish; but I expect and hope that the framework will stand.”

For Darwin, the origin of life was the result of spontaneous generation. The twenty-first century version is now more popularly referred to as abiogenesis, or self-organization. Continue Reading

In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin envisioned that “natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations; it can produce no great or sudden modifications.”

Since 1859, the search for Darwin’s “slight, successive” accumulated actions of natural selection has become a driving scientific and societal phenomenon. In 1872, the British Parliament commissioned the HMS Challenger for first international exploration to discover the “missing links” resulting from natural selection.

Like the HMS Challenger experience, evidence for “slight, successive” evolutionary changes continues to be an elusive pursuit—in the fossil record and now in molecular biology. Darwin’s dilemma deepens with the latest evidence from the Denisova caves in Russia.

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Of all the alleged facts in The Origin of Species, for Charles Darwin embryology stands out as the most important “fact”. In a letter to Asa Gray in September 1860, Darwin wrote – “embryology is to me by far the strongest single class of facts in favor” of the theory.

Darwin was influenced by German embryologist Ernst Haeckel, who coined the now-famous phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. In other words, in the embryo the ontology (development) of the new offspring retraces (recapitulates) all stages representing its alleged evolutionary ancestors (phylogeny) from the microbe to man. Haeckel called the theory the “biogenetic law”.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin gave credit for this theory to Haeckel. “Professor Haeckel in his “Generelle Morphologie” and in [other] works has recently brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny, or the lines of descent of all organic beings. In drawing up the several series he trusts chiefly to embryological characters [to establish evolutionary sequences].”

According to Haeckel, in the embryo is a silent movie of our alleged ancestral history—evolution in action. Through his polished and widely publicized drawings, Haeckel attempted to show that all embryos are identical in the earliest stages followed by progressive “slight, successive” changes of increasing differential complexity—the alleged retracing of evolution.

Much has happened since 1859, however. This week, ScienceDaily featured an article entitled “Similarities in the Embryonic Development of Various Animal Species Are Also Found at Molecular Level”. The article was referring two research papers published in the journal Nature, December. 9, 2010 by the Max Planck Institute that challenge the basic tenets of Haeckel’s theory of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”.

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