Reading response
While reading these articles and watching the video i couldn't help but being skeptical. Science and the different theory's of evolution are constantly changing so why ever take anything to heart? I mean even with the recent discovery of Ardi a big portion of Darwin's theory of evolution has been discredited. Don't get me wrong its obvious evolution exists, their is no arguing that fact.
While reading the Introduction to Evolutionary Biology i got three basic facts out of it. The first, what exactly evolution is. From my understanding evolution is the changing of a species according to their environment over may generations. Its not a slow process, but a very long intricate one with many factors. One of those factors being sexual selection. The idea "survival of the fittest" does not always apply and sexual selection is proof of that. Your genes cant be passed on without a mate, so if your not chosen to mate with your genes dye out. The more attractive you are to the opposite sex the more likely you will be to procreate. To be high in success on the evolutionary chain you do not need to only be strong and beat out your peers but attractive to the opposite sex so you can pass your genes along. So being big and strong is not the key factor in your personal successful evolution but weather you are considered attractive by the opposite sex.
Another factor in the success of a species evolution is the possibility of genetic mutations. If an animals gene is changed something that could have been a positive evolutionary trait could be changed for the worse. A random change in an animals genes is rarely beneficial.
Muriel Smith
Muriel:
ReplyDeleteThank you, you raise important questions. You ask why we should take take science to heart if it's always changing. Outside of mathematics, scientists make no claim to final and absolute truth. We observe and measure things, we try to explain the how and why of what we see. When the evidence doesn't support our explanations we have to seek new ones or revise the old ones and test again. Sometimes theories turn out to be way off base and have to be totally reworked. However, theories that have great explanatory power, that have been tested again and again rarely get tossed out, but they are continually fine-tuned. The discovery of the "Ardi" hominid fossil did not disprove Darwinian Natural Selection at all. It is part of the continually evolving explanation of the path of human evolution. Natural selection describes a mechanism, it doesn't proscribe a particular path.