The Darwinian Revolution

NOVEMBER 3, 2016 / COMMENTS OFF ON THE DARW INIAN REVOLUTION

In 1859, there was a groundbreaking revolution in both the scientific and religious realms:
the origin of species, authored by Charles Darwin, was published. The book changed how
people approach biology forever, and has fundamental impacts on modern science,
religion, and other aspects of the society.

A century and a half later, the influence of Darwin remains. In Australia there is City of
Darwin, named after the evolution giant. There are Darwin branded merchandises,
restaurants, even colleges. However, as Prof. Browne from Harvard University have
lectured, Darwin’s opinions were not fully acknowledged till at least a hundred years later.

At the time when Origin of Species was published, the theories did not immediately gain
popularity. As Prof. Browne put it, it was not a “revolution” but rather a slow change,
stretched out over the course of a century. Darwin’s opinions, as they start to gain
popularity, were very much challenged. Most of the questions come from people who come
from a religious background and the concept of evolution particularly disputed the
existence of a creator. Darwin’s response what safe yet smart: instead of labeling himself as
an atheist, he resorts to being an agnostic, refusing to enter the debate of whether God
exists.

Despite his great achievements, Darwin is still a person with unique personalities, and by
revisiting his life we could unveil how his thoughts came to be and how his theory of
evolution is sparked. Living in a very private, remote estate, Darwin had a wealthy heritage
which provided him with ample time and financial support to pursue his interests. Because
of his remote location, most of the communications with his scientific colleagues are
achieved through mails, and this large amount of correspondence left us with a rather
streamlined thought process of how his theory took its shape. First, through those mails,
we could see that he was a very organized person, and made decisions through listing pros
and cons. One example was when deciding whether or not to get married, he listed the pros
and cons of marriage, and in the end concluding that dying alone would be worse that
having too much company.

Another aspect of Darwin’s theories that the correspondence revealed was the emergence
of similar theories at the time. Multiple people have written to Darwin regarding similar
evolution theories and without Darwin, the evolution theory would probably still be
discovered, but under a different name. Now, since Darwin is the name attached to this
theory, his name, like the Bible, is quoted by people with different agendas. Eugenicists
insist that Darwin’s theory implies that we need to actively “better” our gene while other
groups cite Darwin for other discriminatory policies. Science history views Darwin as a
“saint”, burying him at Westminster Abbey while the British Natural History Museum puts
his sculpture up and down depending how Darwin is perceived by the general public.
Darwin’s simple theory is interpreted and misinterpreted in many different dimensions,
but it is this social discourse that keeps the theory alive and drives science forward.

Darwinism is a theory of biological evolutiondeveloped by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–
1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of
small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. Also
called Darwinian theory, it originally included the broad concepts of transmutation of species or of
evolution which gained general scientific acceptance after Darwin published On the Origin of Species in
1859, including concepts which predated Darwin's theories. English biologist Thomas Henry
Huxley coined the term Darwinism in April 1860.

Darwinism subsequently referred to the specific concepts of natural selection, the Weismann
barrier, or the central dogma of molecular biology.[2] Though the term usually refers strictly to
biological evolution, creationists[who?] have appropriated it to refer to the origin of life.[citation
needed] It is therefore considered the belief and acceptance of Darwin's and of his predecessors'
work, in place of other theories, including divine design and extraterrestrial origins.[3][4]
English biologist Thomas Henry Huxleycoined the term Darwinism in April 1860.[1] It was
used to describe evolutionary concepts in general, including earlier concepts published by
English philosopher Herbert Spencer. Many of the proponents of Darwinism at that time,
including Huxley, had reservations about the significance of natural selection, and Darwin
himself gave credence to what was later called Lamarckism. The strict neo-Darwinismof
German evolutionary biologist August Weismann gained few supporters in the late 19th
century. During the approximate period of the 1880s to about 1920, sometimes called "the
eclipse of Darwinism", scientists proposed various alternative evolutionary
mechanisms which eventually proved untenable. The development of the modern synthesis in
 the early 20th century, incorporating natural selection with population genetics and Mendelian
genetics, revived Darwinism in an updated form.[5]
While the term Darwinism has remained in use amongst the public when referring to modern
evolutionary theory, it has increasingly been argued by science writers such as Olivia
Judson and Eugenie Scott that it is an inappropriate term for modern evolutionary
theory.[6][7] For example, Darwin was unfamiliar with the work of the Moravianscientist
and Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel,[8] and as a result had only a vague and inaccurate
understanding of heredity. He naturally had no inkling of later theoretical developments and,
like Mendel himself, knew nothing of genetic drift, for example.[9][10]
In the United States, creationists often use the term "Darwinism" as a pejorative term in
reference to beliefs such as scientific materialism, but in the United Kingdom the term has no
negative connotations, being freely used as a shorthand for the body of theory dealing with
evolution, and in particular, with evolution by natural selection.[

As evolution became widely accepted in the 1870s, caricatures of Charles Darwinwith the body of an ape or
monkey symbolised evolution.[11]

While the term Darwinism had been used previously to refer to the work of Erasmus Darwin in
the late 18th century, the term as understood today was introduced when Charles Darwin's 1859
book On the Origin of Species was reviewed by Thomas Henry Huxley in the April 1860 issue of
the Westminster Review.[12] Having hailed the book as "a veritable Whitworth gun in the
armoury of liberalism" promoting scientific naturalism over theology, and praising the
usefulness of Darwin's ideas while expressing professional reservations about
Darwin's gradualism and doubting if it could be proved that natural selection could form new
species,[13] Huxley compared Darwin's achievement to that of Nicolaus Copernicus in
explaining planetary motion:

What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little too circular? What if species should
offer residual phenomena, here and there, not explicable by natural selection?
Twenty years hence naturalists may be in a position to say whether this is, or is not,
the case; but in either event they will owe the author of "The Origin of Species" an
immense debt of gratitude.... And viewed as a whole, we do not believe that, since
the publication of Von Baer's "Researches on Development," thirty years ago, any
work has appeared calculated to exert so large an influence, not only on the future
of Biology, but in extending the domination of Science over regions of thought into
which she has, as yet, hardly penetrated.[1]
These are the basic tenets of evolution by natural selection as defined by Darwin:

1. More individuals are produced each generation than can survive.

2. Phenotypic variation exists among individuals and the variation is heritable.
3. Those individuals with heritable traits better suited to the environment will survive.
4. When reproductive isolation occurs new species will form.
Another important evolutionary theorist of the same period was the Russian geographer and
prominent anarchist Peter Kropotkin who, in his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of
Evolution(1902), advocated a conception of Darwinism counter to that of Huxley. His
conception was centred around what he saw as the widespread use of co-operation as a survival
mechanism in human societies and animals. He used biological and sociologicalarguments in an
attempt to show that the main factor in facilitating evolution is cooperation between individuals
in free-associated societies and groups. This was in order to counteract the conception of
fierce competition as the core of evolution, which provided a rationalization for the dominant
political, economic and social theories of the time; and the prevalent interpretations of
Darwinism, such as those by Huxley, who is targeted as an opponent by Kropotkin. Kropotkin's
conception of Darwinism could be summed up by the following quote:

In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies,
and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood,
of course, in its wide Darwinian sense—not as a struggle for the sheer means of
existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the
species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its
narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest
development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most
open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the
possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher
intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the
maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The
unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.[14]
— Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Conclusion

Modern biology began in the nineteenth century with Charles Darwin's work on evolution by natural selection.

Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences
in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in
the heritable traits characteristic of a populationover generations. Charles Darwin popularised
the term "natural selection", contrasting it with artificial selection, which in his view is
intentional, whereas natural selection is not.
Variation exists within all populations of organisms. This occurs partly because
random mutations arise in the genome of an individual organism, and their offspring can
inherit such mutations. Throughout the lives of the individuals, their genomes interact with their
environments to cause variations in traits. The environment of a genome includes the molecular
biology in the cell, other cells, other individuals, populations, species, as well as the abiotic
environment. Because individuals with certain variants of the trait tend to survive and reproduce
more than individuals with other less successful variants, the population evolves. Other factors
affecting reproductive success include sexual selection (now often included in natural selection)
and fecundity selection.
Natural selection acts on the phenotype, the characteristics of the organism which actually
interact with the environment, but the genetic(heritable) basis of any phenotype that gives that
phenotype a reproductive advantage may become more common in a population. Over time,
this process can result in populations that specialise for particular ecological
niches(microevolution) and may eventually result in speciation (the emergence of new
species, macroevolution). In other words, natural selection is a key process in the evolution of a
population.
Natural selection is a cornerstone of modern biology. The concept, published by Darwin
and Alfred Russel Wallace in a joint presentation of papers in 1858, was elaborated in
Darwin's influential 1859 book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the
Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. He described natural selection as
analogous to artificial selection, a process by which animals and plants with traits considered
desirable by human breeders are systematically favoured for reproduction. The concept of
natural selection originally developed in the absence of a valid theory of heredity; at the time of
Darwin's writing, science had yet to develop modern theories of genetics. The union of
traditional Darwinian evolution with subsequent discoveries in classical geneticsformed
the modern synthesis of the mid-20th century. The addition of molecular geneticshas led
to evolutionary developmental biology, which explains evolution at the molecular level.
While genotypes can slowly change by random genetic drift, natural selection remains the
primary explanation for adaptive evolution.

The East African fossilsEdit

Fossil hominid evolution display at The Museum of Osteology, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S..

During the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of fossils were found in East Africa in the regions of
the Olduvai Gorge and Lake Turkana. These searches were carried out by the Leakey family,
with Louis Leakey and his wife Mary Leakey, and later their son Richardand daughter-in-
law Meave, fossil hunters and paleoanthropologists. From the fossil beds of Olduvai and Lake
Turkana they amassed specimens of the early hominins:
the australopithecines and Homo species, and even Homo erectus.
These finds cemented Africa as the cradle of humankind. In the late 1970s and the
1980s, Ethiopia emerged as the new hot spot of paleoanthropology after "Lucy", the most
complete fossil member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, was found in 1974
by Donald Johanson near Hadar in the desertic Afar Triangle region of northern Ethiopia.
Although the specimen had a small brain, the pelvis and leg bones were almost identical in
function to those of modern humans, showing with certainty that these hominins had walked
erect.[64] Lucy was classified as a new species, Australopithecus afarensis, which is thought to
be more closely related to the genus Homo as a direct ancestor, or as a close relative of an
unknown ancestor, than any other known hominid or hominin from this early time
range; see terms "hominid" and "hominin".[65] (The specimen was nicknamed "Lucy" after the
Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", which was played loudly and repeatedly in the
camp during the excavations.)[66] The Afar Trianglearea would later yield discovery of many
more hominin fossils, particularly those uncovered or described by teams headed by Tim D.
White in the 1990s, including Ardipithecus ramidus and Ardipithecus kadabba.[67]
In 2013, fossil skeletons of Homo naledi, an extinct species of hominin assigned
(provisionally) to the genus Homo, were found in the Rising Star Cave system, a site in South
Africa's Cradle of Humankind region in Gauteng province near Johannesburg.[68][69]As of
September 2015, fossils of at least fifteen individuals, amounting to 1,550 specimens, have been
excavated from the cave.[69] The species is characterized by a body mass and stature similar to
small-bodied human populations, a smaller endocranial volume similar to Australopithecus,
and a cranial morphology(skull shape) similar to early Homo species. The skeletal anatomy
combines primitive features known from australopithecines with features known from early
hominins. The individuals show signs of having been deliberately disposed of within the cave
near the time of death. The fossils were dated close to 250,000 years ago,[70] and thus are not a
direct ancestor but a contemporary with the first appearance of larger-brained anatomically
modern humans.[71]
The genetic revolutionEdit

Louis Leakey examining skulls from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania

The genetic revolution in studies of human evolution started when Vincent Sarich and Allan
Wilson measured the strength of immunological cross-reactions of blood
serum albumin between pairs of creatures, including humans and African apes (chimpanzees
and gorillas).[72] The strength of the reaction could be expressed numerically as an
immunological distance, which was in turn proportional to the number of amino acid differences
between homologous proteins in different species. By constructing a calibration curve of the ID
of species' pairs with known divergence times in the fossil record, the data could be used as
a molecular clock to estimate the times of divergence of pairs with poorer or unknown fossil
records.
In their seminal 1967 paper in Science, Sarich and Wilson estimated the divergence time of
humans and apes as four to five million years ago,[72] at a time when standard interpretations of
the fossil record gave this divergence as at least 10 to as much as 30 million years. Subsequent
fossil discoveries, notably "Lucy", and reinterpretation of older fossil materials,
notably Ramapithecus, showed the younger estimates to be correct and validated the albumin
method.
Progress in DNA sequencing, specifically mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and then Y-
chromosome DNA (Y-DNA) advanced the understanding of human
origins.[73][14][74]Application of the molecular clock principle revolutionized the study
of molecular evolution.
On the basis of a separation from the orangutan between 10 and 20 million years ago, earlier
studies of the molecular clock suggested that there were about 76 mutations per generation that
were not inherited by human children from their parents; this evidence supported the divergence
time between hominins and chimpanzees noted above. However, a 2012 study in Iceland of 78
children and their parents suggests a mutation rate of only 36 mutations per generation; this
datum extends the separation between humans and chimpanzees to an earlier period greater than
7 million years ago (Ma). Additional research with 226 offspring of wild chimpanzee
populations in eight locations suggests that chimpanzees reproduce at age 26.5 years on average;
which suggests the human divergence from chimpanzees occurred between 7 and 13 million
years ago. And these data suggest that Ardipithecus (4.5 Ma), Orrorin (6 Ma)
and Sahelanthropus (7 Ma) all may be on the hominid lineage, and even that the separation may
have occurred outside the East African Rift region.
Furthermore, analysis of the two species' genes in 2006 provides evidence that after human
ancestors had started to diverge from chimpanzees, interspecies mating between "proto-human"
and "proto-chimpanzees" nonetheless occurred regularly enough to change certain genes in the
new gene pool:
A new comparison of the human and chimpanzee genomes suggests that after the two
lineages separated, they may have begun interbreeding... A principal finding is that the X
chromosomes of humans and chimpanzees appear to have divergedabout 1.2 million years
more recently than the other chromosomes.

The research suggests:

There were in fact two splits between the human and chimpanzee lineages, with the first
being followed by interbreeding between the two populations and then a second split. The
suggestion of a hybridization has startled paleoanthropologists, who nonetheless are
treating the new genetic data seriously
ine and Nature timeline.)

Hominins

0.2 Mya
H.sapiens
 0.6 Mya
H.heidelbergensis

1.9 Mya
H.erectus

2.8 Mya
H.habilis

4.0 Mya
Australopithecus

(view • discuss)

Main article: Archaic humans

Before DarwinEdit
The word homo, the name of the biological genus to which humans belong, is Latin for
"human".[b] It was chosen originally by Carl Linnaeus in his classification system.[c] The word
"human" is from the Latin humanus, the adjectival form of homo. The Latin "homo" derives
from the Indo-European root *dhghem, or "earth".[57] Linnaeus and other scientists of his time
also considered the great apes to be the closest relatives of humans based
on morphologicaland anatomical similarities.[58]
DarwinEdit
The possibility of linking humans with earlier apes by descent became clear only after 1859 with
the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, in which he argued for the idea of
the evolution of new species from earlier ones. Darwin's book did not address the question of
human evolution, saying only that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his
history."[59]
The first debates about the nature of human evolution arose between Thomas Henry
Huxley and Richard Owen. Huxley argued for human evolution from apes by illustrating many
of the similarities and differences between humans and apes, and did so particularly in his 1863
book Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. However, many of Darwin's early supporters (such
as Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Lyell) did not initially agree that the origin of the mental
capacities and the moral sensibilities of humans could be explained by natural selection, though
this later changed. Darwin applied the theory of evolution and sexual selection to humans when
he published The Descent of Man in 1871.[60]
First fossilsEdit
A major problem in the 19th century was the lack of fossil intermediaries. Neanderthal remains
were discovered in a limestone quarry in 1856, three years before the publication of On the
Origin of Species, and Neanderthal fossils had been discovered in Gibraltar even earlier, but it
was originally claimed that these were human remains of a creature suffering some kind of
illness.[61]Despite the 1891 discovery by Eugène Duboisof what is now called Homo
erectus at Trinil, Java, it was only in the 1920s when such fossils were discovered in Africa, that
intermediate species began to accumulate.[62]In 1925, Raymond
Dart described Australopithecus africanus.[63] The type specimen was the Taung Child, an
australopithecine infant which was discovered in a cave. The child's remains were a remarkably
well-preserved tiny skull and an endocast of the brain.
Although the brain was small (410 cm3), its shape was rounded, unlike that of chimpanzees
and gorillas, and more like a modern human brain. Also, the specimen showed short canine
teeth, and the position of the foramen magnum (the hole in the skull where the spine enters)
was evidence of bipedal locomotion. All of these traits convinced Dart that the Taung Child was
a bipedal human ancestor, a transitional form between apes and humans.

Human evolution is the evolutionary process that led to the emergence of anatomically
modern humans, beginning with the evolutionary history of primates—in
particular genus Homo—and leading to the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species of
the hominid family, the great apes. This process involved the gradual development of traits such
as human bipedalism and language,[1] as well as interbreeding with other hominins, which
indicate that human evolution was not linear but a web.[2][3][4][5]
The study of human evolution involves severalscientific disciplines, including physical
anthropology, primatology, archaeology, paleontology, neurobiology, ethology, linguistics,
evolutionary psychology, embryology and genetics.[6] Genetic studies show that primates
diverged from other mammals about 85 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous period, and
the earliest fossils appear in the Paleocene, around 55 million years ago.[7]
Within the Hominoidea (apes aka hominoids) superfamily, the Hominidae (great apes aka
hominids) family diverged from the Hylobatidae (lesser apes aka gibbons etc.) family some 15–
20 million years ago; Homininae (African apes) subfamily diverged
from Ponginae (orangutans [a]) about 14 million years ago; the Hominini tribe
(including humans, Australopithecines and other extinct biped genera, and chimpanzees)
parted from the Gorillini tribe (gorillas) between 8–9 million years ago; and, in turn, the
subtribes Hominina (hominins, humans and extinct biped ancestors) and Panina(chimpanzees)
separated 4–7 million years ago.[8]