Posts Tagged ‘Origin of Species’

The Origin of Species written by Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century late remains one of the most influential books ever written. Of the original 1,250 first edition copies released on the 24^th of November in 1859, occasionally one becomes available for purchase. Rare book collector Peter Harringtonn is selling a first edition copy for $ 249,556.13 through Abebooks.com.

The eventual buyer of this rare book should know at least 5 things The Origin of Species isn’t.
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Just a month before Christmas, Charles Darwin had successfully launched one of the most notable effects on modern Western society with the publication of The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection on the 24^th of November.

Even though all 1,250 copies of the first printing of the book were sold on the first day, by Christmas Darwin “found himself disturbed, even haunted,” in the words of Rebecca Stott in the book Darwin’s Ghosts, the Secret History of Evolution.

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In The Origin of Species the giraffe was used as one of Charles Darwin’s most lasting examples of evolution. Darwin argued, that “by this process long-continued [natural selection] it seems to me almost certain that an ordinary hoofed quadruped [horse-like animals] might be converted into a giraffe.”

“The giraffe’, Darwin continued, “by its lofty stature, much elongated neck, fore-legs, head and tongue, has its whole frame beautifully adapted [evolved] for browsing on the higher branches of trees.”
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Throughout the sixth edition of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin used the giraffe as an example to illustrate evolution through natural selection. Since the nineteenth century, however, the unfolding of scientific evidence continues to undermine – rather than support – Darwin’s contention that the long neck of the giraffe serves to illustrate evolution.

Undermining evidence is found in the giraffe’s leaf eating habits, fossil record, anatomy, physiology, and genetics.
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Scientists last week have proposed evolutionary relationships among all 9,993 of the world’s known living bird species. In a study published in the prestigious Nature journal, scientists used DNA-sequence data to create a radiating phylogenetic tree — a branching map of proposed evolutionary relationships among species. From the genetic data, rates of global bird speciation across space and time were estimated.

Walter Jetz, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut was the leading author of the study entitled “The global diversity of birds in space and time”.

“This is the first dated tree of life for a class of species this size to be put on a global map,” says Walter Jetz, in an interview with science writer Virginia Gewin of Nature News.

Gewin noted, however, that the “endeavor is also controversial, owing to the large number of species for which no sequence data are available.”

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Since the publication of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin in 1859, the origin of feathers has been among the most contentious issues in evolutionary paleobiology.

A new study published in the October 26 edition of Science, led by paleontologists Darla Zelenitsky from the University of Calgary, describe the first the first dinosaur named Ornithomimus found with evidence of feathers preserved in a juvenile and two adult skeletons in North America that had been discovered in 1995, 2008, and 2009. The published study was entitled “Feathered Non-Avian Dinosaurs from North America Provide Insight into Wing Origins”.

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After graduating tenth out of a field of 178 students from Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, Charles Darwin gradually, but surely, began to openly reflect his hostile and aggressive heritage against Christianity stemming from his grandfathers.

In the biography entitled Darwin, the Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, Adrian Desmond and James Moore sets the stage by declaring that “Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus had a lacerating wit and a loathing of meddling gods”. Continue Reading

Following in the footsteps of Frenchman Jean-Baptist Lamarck, Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species introduced a revolutionary new theory of biological evolution with the concept of natural selection.

Lamarck had envisioned evolution acting through the “Progress in complexity… due to the influence of environment and of acquired habits”. Darwin extended Lamarck’s “Progress in complexity” theory with the new proposed natural law of evolution−natural selection: “This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.”

Evolution, since then, has been envisioned as a unidirectional preservation process of an unending increase in biological complexity; from microbe to man. New evidence from the HOX gene, however, undermines these fundamental tenets of evolution. Continue Reading

“Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors,” according to the Smithsonian Institute presentation entitled “Introduction to Human Evolution”.

The Smithsonian declares that the “[s]cientific evidence show that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.” This forward sounding statement, however, is scientifically unsound.
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Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species never used the terms genetics, genetic or genes. In the words of American evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, “Darwin knew nothing about genes.”

The term “genetics,” was first coined in 1905 by English geneticist William Bateson in a personal letter to colleague Alan Sedgwick. Since then, genetics has emerged to be the center of evolutionary research for more than a century.

This last week, the research article in the journal Science entitled “A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic Denisovan Individual” captured media headlines worldwide. Continue Reading