The evolution theories.
By the term of evolution is meant the
development of natural and social occurrence. Some negligible and invisible
changes occur evolutionary. The evolution theory gives us the explanation of
historical development of living things.
In this assay I try to describe the
development of the main evolution conceptions from the ancient times to now
days. The beginning and development of life have always been a matter of
people’s concern and interest. Rather than the theory of evolution, we should
speak of several theories of evolution. On the one hand, this plurality has to
do with the different explanations advanced for the mechanism of evolution, and
on the other, with the various philosophies on which it is based.
Before a theory can be
included in the system of science, it must
meet all of the following criteria:
1.
its ability to explain what has been observed;
2.
its ability to predict what has not yet been
observed; and
3.
its ability to be tested by further
experimentation and to be modified as required by the acquisition of new data.
These
definitions mean that a scientific theory is not used, as people often use the
word theory, to mean a hunch or a guess. A
scientific theory is held with a high degree of confidence and is supported by
enough evidence to make its abandonment unlikely. As new
evidence is found, a theory may be modified but only with compelling evidence,
verification and peer review. The business of science is to build
theories that explain how the natural world works and can predict how it might
work in the future.
Let’s take a
look at the most prevailing theories.
After more than
two thousand year old history of science development in ancient Greece, Rome,
China and India the European countries fall into dark middle ages, a pitch darkness
for natural science. People were burnt on fire not only for telling the ideas
of life development, but also for reading books of ancient natural scientists
and philosophers. Violent implementation of religion makes science a church
appendage. The Renaissance appeared a real breakthrough in the sphere of
natural science.
The ideas of
evolution begin to appear in the works of some philosophers and natural
scientists. In 1646-1716 the gradation principle was declared by Leibnitz who
divined the existence of intermediary forms between plants and animals.
Hereafter, the principle of gradation has been amplified in conception of “the
ladder of beings”, which became a picture of ideal continuity of formation for
some and confirmation of evolution of living things for others.
Fairly, this
theory had the right to exist. But, in my opinion, it is not reliable in now
days because of its primitive.
By the 18th
century, scientists have gone through a great deal of work collecting and
describing plants and animals throughout the world. But it started to become
more and more difficult to orient oneself in the ocean of information that
they’d cumulated. A Swedish naturalist Karl Linney has colligated and
systemized the data. He laid a foundation of modern systematic.
In order to
classify the great amount of plant and animal descriptions a specific
systematic unit was needed. Linney thought the genus is the unit. Genus was
called a group of persons that shared the same qualities. The genus consists of
the variety of kin persons that gives plentiful offspring. For example, a wild
raspberry is a specific genus, strawberry is another genus and cranberry is a
third genus. All the domestic cats make up an independent genus, tigers do, too
and so on. Therefore, all the organic world consists of different genera of
plants and animals. All the living nature consists of somewhat like the
separate elements, the genera.
It is hard to
agree with this theory as well because the modern stage of biology evolution
makes it clear that the genus cannot be the only unit of systematic. Because of
the religious influence on science at that time can be concluded that Linney
was an idealist. He insisted that in nature there are plants and animals
species just as many as the God has created at the very beginning of the world.
So, I cannot agree to this point.
A French
scientist Lamark is known as the first biologist who tried to develop a
complete theory of life evolution. He introduced the term of gradation as an
internal force of improvement inherent to all living things. By the act of this
factor of evolution defines the development of living nature and constant
improvement of organization of beings from the simple forms to the most
developed ones. According to Lamark, all animal and plant classes are being
constantly changed and improved in their organization as a result of influence
of external environment and some kind of internal tendency of improvement.
All the organisms were allocated by Lamark to 14 different classes and put in
the ladder of beings in specific order:
1.
protista and polypus;
2.
radiant and worms;
3.
insects and spiders;
4.
crustacea and annulates;
5.
shellfish;
6.
fish, reptiles, birds and mammals.
This theory is
more substantial than the previous ones. For his time period Lamark has very
successfully developed the question of species change under influence of
natural causes and noted the importance of time and environmental conditions in
evolution process, which was accounted as demonstration of a blanket law of
natural development. The merit of Lamark is that he was the first one to
announce the genealogical classification of animals according to the kinship
principle.
Speaking of the Evolution theory it would
be wrong to avoid the great work of Darwin. Charles Darvin lived in the time of
rapid society development when natural science was on the up-grade. There were
many scientific inventions. The epochal work “Origins of species” has been
republished seven times during the author’s life. It became known to many
scientists from other countries and has been translated into the majority of
European languages. The driving forces of evolution, according to Darwin, are
heritable change and natural selection. Evolution theory says that all living
things are related to one another through common ancestry from earlier forms
that differed from the present forms. According to the theory, variability
among individuals in a population of sexually reproducing organisms is produced
by mutation and genetic recombination. The mutation becomes a base of new words
of organisms structures and functions formation, and the heritance anchors
them. The resulting genetic variability is subject to natural selection in the
environment.
Despite the
popularity of that theory, I cannot call it the absolutely right, as well.
Darwinism is discredited by the lack of prognoses and unability to forecast new
facts. Darwinism turned out to be very appealing to the materially oriented
scientific society of 19th century because this evolution conception
alleged to eliminate supernatural ideas of ancestry. It seems to me that the
appeal of Darwinism is that it uses pure mechanistic explanations for the
evolutionary process allowing the appeal to the term of contingency.
The account of
all the system of modern evolutionary biology is a compositive evolution
theory, the principal case of which have been established by the works of
Chetverikov, Fisher, Holdane, Dubinin and etc. The elementary cell of a
compositive evolution theory is a population. The elementary particle of
heredity is a gene. The hereditary change of population in a particular way
happens under influence of evolutionary factors, such as the mutation process,
population waves, isolation and natural selection. The first place in the compositive
evolution theory belongs to population, not to ontogenesis. This theory, in my
opinion, is the most perfect. It is more integral in theoretical and
terminological views. It might be related to the ability of this theory to
systemize in itself variety of terms and reflect the full system of
evolutionary process.
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