Evolution
Uploaded by Phil Allemang on Nov 08, 2001
Since the dawn of humanity, there has been a single question that has puzzled even the greatest of philosophers and scientists. Humans are, by nature, interested in their past. As a result, every civilization through out time has sought to find the origin of life, and answered it to meet their needs. Early civilizations taught that there was a group of gods located on a far off mountain at the edge of the earth. These gods were responsible everything, ranging from the rising and setting of the sun to a young man winning a fair maidens hand in marriage.
Civilizations grew more complex and learned more about the world around them. Soon events that were once looked at as magical or supernatural were explained and proven through logic, mathematical reasoning, and the evidence available. In the early to mid nineteenth century a scientist named Charles Darwin proposed a theory that broke the away from the common threads of reasoning that looked to deity or a higher force intervening with humans. Darwin’s proposition was labeled Natural Selection, or more commonly referred to as the survival of the fittest. Darwin proposed that living beings evolve, or change, to meet the needs of the environment around them to allow the species to continue surviving if conditions such as the food source changes
As with the theories and beliefs of early cultures, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was questioned and uncertain. When something new is presented to the world it is examined and tested to be show the human race that it is accurate.
Logically the concept of a living organism changing over a long period of time was hard for people to accept. A community that insists life must come from life, just as motion must come from motion. Just as a billiard ball is incapable of rolling without a force being applied, a stone is incapable of give birth to an amoeba.
The final opposition to the theory of evolution is the lack of supporting physical evidence. One of the best-known ways to learn of animals and life from ancient animals was to uncover fossils and bone material located in a fossil record. The fossil record is a name applied to the layers upon layers of fossils and soil found in the earths crust. Early in the stages of geology, evolutionary theory proposed that the fossils that would be unearthed would be clear evidence for...