"Darwin's Five Laws are:

1.Evolution as such
This is the understanding that the world is not constant, nor recently created, nor cycling, but is changing; and that the types of entities that live on it also change.

This contradicts the `common sense' notion, prevalent in Western society since the ancient Greeks, that different animals and plants each had its own `essence' and, as a consequence, could not change from one kind to another any more than a triangle could change to a square.

You only had to look at a cat and a dog and ask how one could change into the other. Nowadays, we do not think of a cat changing into a dog, but ask about a common ancestor of both, from a time long before cats and dogs appeared.

2.Common descent
This is the understanding that every group of living entities that we know of on this planet descended from a common ancestor.

Common descent occurs because one lineage would, willy-nilly, be a little more prolific than another, and would thereby wipe out the other. So only one survives.

(Prions are an exception. These are proteins of a particular shape that catalyze other proteins to take on the same shape. Prions are not life in the usual sense of the word although they are self-replicating. Similarly, no one thinks of an economy as living in the usual sense of the word, even though an economy can reproduce it itself, too.)

Rather than ask how a cat could change into a dog, we ask how a previous ancestor of both could give birth to an animal that is slightly more suited to the wolf way of making a living than to the feline profession. (Ecologists call plants' and animals' ways of surviving and reproducing in the world their `niches'. These are what we humans call our `professions'.)

The answer is straight forward, one animal's blue prints, what some people in the latter 19th century called its germ plasm, and what modern people call its DNA, varied one from another. That change enabled an adult who was born with that variation to live more like a wolf or modern dog than its parents.

This understanding, by the way, answers the age-old question, `which came first, the chicken or the egg?' The egg came first, because it contains the part that changed. The egg was laid by a non- or pre-chicken entity; the egg grew up to be a chicken.

Only if you think that adult animals and plants can change their nature, and pass on that change to their children, will you think that perhaps the chicken came first. This latter form of change is called Lamarckianism. Human culture is invented by grown people and passed on by parents to their children. It is Lamarckian. But the looks and actions of animals, at least those without culture of their own, are passed on genetically. A parent's action does not influence the looks and actions of the child. Only changes in the egg change the child.

At the time Darwin wrote, many evolutionists still thought of animals and plants as being like humans. They asked whether an adult proto-giraffe could stretch its neck to reach higher leaves, and pass on a longer neck to its children, much as human parents pass on a language to their children.

3.Multiplication of species

This is the understanding that species either split into or bud off other species, often through the geographical isolation of a founder species.

Because different ecological niches provide different ways for an animal or plant to live — provide different `professions' — and because blueprints do not copy perfectly, different plants and come to fill different niches, with different shapes and behaviors.

4.Gradualism
This is the understanding that changes take place through the gradual change of population rather than the sudden production of new individuals.

`Gradual' is a relative word. In discussions of `punctuated equilibria', I have heard people talk of one species replacing another in the `blink of an eye'. What they meant was a time period that is many many times as long as written human history. The `blink' might last 100,000 years. In human terms, this is a long time. But in geological terms, 100,000 years is short. Hence the use of the phrase. But to humans, a change over 100,000, or over merely 10,000 years, seems gradual.

Put another way, gradualists claim that it is unlikely that starting tomorrow at 9 am, all humans born would possess green skins and lay large, hard shelled eggs.

5.Natural selection
This is the understanding that individuals in every generation are different from one another, or, at least some of them are. In every generation some individuals survive and reproduce better than others. Their genes multiply.

This is the key idea: natural reproduction is not perfect.

People make considerable efforts to ensure that human copies are perfect. Inexact copying indicates a failure of the scribe or bug in the program.

In natural reproduction, children may be similar to their parent if they bud from that one parent and if no stray cosmic ray changes their DNA and no DNA enters their cell from another.

More sophisticated plants and animals have two parents. These are species with sexual reproduction. In this circumstance, children come from mixtures of the two parents' genetic material. This mixing induces variation among the children.

Some of those children will do a better job at one or other niche open to it, and consequently will be more likely to survive and propagate whatever enables it to survive and propagate better.

The environment in which plants and animals reproduce is defined by the world around each plant or animal: and part of that world consists of other entities of the same type. Put another way, plants and animals must survive and reproduce in a world with others of their own type. The others will be the same species, with similar skills and talents.

This means that selection occurs within a species even when the rest of the environment does not change. (Incidentally, when characteristics like perceived health influence sexual choice, the process is called `sexual selection'.)

Increased intelligence sometimes increases survival and reproduction. David Brin suggested this in 1982 2. Doubtless, others enjoyed the same insight earlier.

For example, a female peahen will have more healthy offspring (probabilistically speaking) if she is able to identify a peacock that is more healthy than its peers. This task requires more intelligence than not being able to make the identification.

A side effect of this process is that some lineages should gain certain features, such as intelligence, even without changes in the non-lineage part of the environment. Not all lineages will gain these, since alternative ways to survive and reproduce also exist. But some lineages will.

This means that if the dinosaurs had survived, we humans might not exist. Instead dinosaur-descended beings might exist in our stead and these beings might also communicate symbolically, as we humans do in language.

Interestingly, Ernst Mayr 3, among others, does not accept this line of reasoning, and therefore argues that high level intelligence is a happenstance rather than an outcome that may well occur on any living world on which complex life survives for long enough.

Well, to be more precise, I think Mayr does accept this reasoning, but in his writing he focuses primarily on a different argument, that involving `purpose'. Evolution lacks purpose, but many people think otherwise, either because humans act according to purposes, or because their beliefs suggest it.

The requirement for lengthy survival poses barriers. As Peter Douglas Ward and Donald Brownlee point out 4, planets endure catastrophes that are frequent over the eons. A stable sun, like ours, grows brighter as it ages. The inward side of a solar system's `habitable zone' moves outwards. This makes a `runaway greenhouse' as on Venus more likely. If the planet starts out closer to the inward side of its habitable zone than earth, the planet may die before complex life has time to evolve.

Or microbes may consume so much carbon dioxide and other `greenhouse' gases that rather than overheat, the planet may freeze. The freeze may kill every living being on it before volcanic eruptions increase the supply of greenhouse gases which warm the planet.

Or major volcanic eruptions may poison the land and sea, or asteroids may strike.

As a practical matter, complex life may be rare, even if simple life is common"

Refrences here:

http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/evolution.html

I think we're ready to call evolution a Law. Maybe this can avoid the bizarre confusions.

Darwin was extremely insightful. I'm amazed that anyone questions his discoveries, in general.

Well I think it's time to erase the confusion about evolution as being a "theory". Sure, in scientific terms this implies truth but like the "Laws of Gravity" it should be regarded as the "Laws of Evolution" by now.

beg to differ.

Majority of the theory behind so called 'laws of gravity' can be mathmatically derived using simple formulas.

Have yet to see a short formula that fits evolution as it is currently propagated.

try looking around you...it is everywhere you look

Subjective relativity (eyes of the beholder) is not a mathmatically exact formula.

one man sees the apple that fell from the tree. (and it tastes good - and gravational theroy is born). Another man sees the apple that fell from the tree. (and he plants it and a tree springs forth).

I don't think we're ever going to get a mathematically exact formula for evolution. Lots of true things don't have mathematical formulae. For instance, if you feed a cow some grass, eventually it will poop. This is true, but there's no real way to express that mathematically. It's not a "law", but it's 100% true. You can describe every chemical and physical change as it occurs inside the cow mathematically, if you like, but that's not relevant to the central truth that if you feed a cow some grass, it will poop. It's not subjective either.

We need something else to describe evolution, though, because if I hear one more Christian who knows nothing about it using the term "just a theory", Imma cut someone. How would you suggest dealing with that problem?

The theory of evolution is constantly changing.Darwin thought it occurred slowly with a, more or less, constant slow rate of change. This version has been mostly held until fairly recently when it was learned that species can change rapidly from pressure caused by a changing environment.

The human genome project has unleashed major discoveries recently that shed a whole new light on the process of evolution. For example a defective gene in the jaw muscle appears to have allowed the human brain case to expand to a much larger structure allowing a much larger and more complex brain. I similar event led to the opposed thumb.

Statistical analysis would indicate that the human species has actually be devolving after the rise of civilization. Conditions exist for the smartest and most physically fit to have less children than the less fit.

Have you tried dropping a lead weight on your foot lately? As simple a formula as you can get...we know that evolution is true...we're way past that.

Perhaps one can measure 'evolution' as a species moves from 'here'(1 bc) to 'here' (2010 AD) but that does not explane the decided lack of evolution in the attitudes of humans we still throw rocks at each other (and those 'rocks' have evolved to the point where death comes to millions at the toss of one).

Sadly, the principle that organisms might fight over limited resources is not only easily explained by evolution, but sometimes drives it.

Darwin's Sixth Law: There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live

How about we actually require evolution to be taught properly, rather then playing to the idiocracy and ignorance of the Christians and other religionists? I'm tired of everything being rewritten to satisfy their whiny needs. I have no problem understanding "theory" and what it means, but we continue to allow their willing ignorances to make the decisions.

I haven't been to school in a long time but I didn't realize that problem really existed except in a few odd spots.

The theory has changed dramatically since Darwin but the basics are still intact.

Darwin thought evolution was caused by random mutation and "survival of the fittest". That theory would explain some species but others follow the "survival of the deformed" and mass changes have been caused by "events" such as massive solar flares as opposed to random, everyday genetic mutation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0D_k4lYrdo

I found a Youtube link to the theory (as opposed to some crap just posted on youtube. Anyone interested in human evolution should take a look at this.

There is another event associated with the human thumb.

sounds like someone is pushing for an "A" in basic genetics! Good work earthling

Well that would be ideal, but sadly it clashes with their religion, which apparently is government-appointed as bulletproof.


And how great is that? This is why science is wonderful -as new information becomes available, it changes too!

I consider a very well established fact that creatures of presently existing species are descendants of creatures that had belonged to different species.

Exactly how this development occurred is something we are still learning about - I don't accept any form of the 'theory of evolution' as fact.

Most of the components of the 'theories of evolution' are solid - natural selection influences the frequencies of alleles within a population, causing drastic changes in a species over a long period of time. Thats evolution, and it can lead to the development of a creature that can no longer interbreed with isolated relatives, creating a new species.

My beef with the classic theory of evolution has always been regarding the 'source of new genetic material'. Many scientist, for many decades, seems to believe that 'accidental base-pair mutation' (transcription errors, cosmic rays, mutagenic chemicals changing a single adenine to a guanine, ie) could provide enough successful variety, enough new material for natural selection to work with. They also thought that this happened within a species, with no horizontal (one species to another) movement of genetic material.

I've always thought this to be ********. I don't have evidence for this, but it makes more sense to me that there might be mechanism for drastically increasing mutation rates during times of stress; mechanisms for producing some offspring that are close to the parents genome, and some offspring which are farther removed; mechanisms for moving far more genetic material than we'd thought from one species to another; mechanisms for trying out new genetic material not on the level of changing individual base pairs, but on the level of entire genes or large groups of genes (activating/inactivating them, or moving them as a group to another species). In a sense, while evolution still relies heavily on random events, it might be less so than we'd thought.

Metalwing wrote:




Yes, yes, and yes. This is one of the most relevant comments I've seen on here about the theory of evolution. 'It' isn't one single theory, but a collection of related beliefs; some more solid than others; most of which have developed over time.



Exactly. And consider that the cost to sequence a genome has been plummeting continuously over the past 10 years, and the cost of data storage and computational power has been steadily dropping ever since modern computers were invented - it would seem we are moving inexorably towards the day when we'll have the ability to analyze insane amounts of genetic information, giving us unprecedented insight in exactly how 'evolution' really works.




While this is true, I would also consider this 'evolution'. Using the word 'devolution' suggest, to me, some presupposition of what qualities evolution 'ought' to produce. The shift you are suggesting (away from intelligence and strength) is possible exactly because the mechanisms of evolution are blind to those kinds of judgements. Evolution doesn't intrinsically promote strength nor intelligence - it promotes whatever genes are most successful at survival/propagation in the given circumstances.


I just wanted to comment on this because its so common in straw man arguments against evolution. Some anti-evolutionists believe that evolution ought to select for whatever they think might be good for survival; if it doesn't do so, then 'the theory of evolution is wrong'. It makes it hard to have a real conversation about the possible merits and flaws of the theory of evolution.

The trend from Leonardo De Vinci to Homer Simpson is not uphill.

I never said we were evolved...only evolving. Some a lot slower than others.