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And, to be sure, selfish genes can produce selfish behaviors. But there is also a huge scientific literature on how evolution can favor genes that lead to cooperation, altruism, and even morality. Our forebears may not have been entirely beastly after all, and in any case, the jungle, with its variety of animals, many of which live in quite complex and cooperative societies, is not as lawless as the saying implies.
roughly 250 generations of civilized society lie atop 300,000 generations
Donald Brown
There is an increasing (and disturbing) tendency of psychologists, biologists, and philosophers to Darwinize every aspect of human behavior, turning its study into a scientific parlor game.
human sacrifice was once an important part of many societies. That too has thankfully disappeared.
None of this has anything to do with evolution, for the change is happening far too fast to be caused by our genes. It is clear, then, that whatever genetic heritage we have, it is not a straitjacket that traps us forever in the “beastly” ways of our forebears. Evolution tells us where we came from, not where we can go.
a mysterious universe without any purpose,
Natural selection is a powerful, elegant, and economic explicator of life on earth in all its diversity, and perhaps it contains the seeds of a rival creation myth that would have the added power of being true—but it awaits its inspired synthesizer, its poet, its Milton....
And far from constricting our actions, the study of evolution can liberate our minds.
Yet Darwin was so correct, and accomplished so much in The Origin, that for many people evolutionary biology has become synonymous with his name.
Like species, languages have speciation and common ancestry.
The origin of life itself is the remit not of evolutionary biology, but of abiogenesis, a scientific field that encompasses chemistry, geology, and molecular biology.
Robert Hazen’s Gen*e*sis: The Scientific Quest for Life’s Origin.
http://andabien.com/html/evolution-timeline.htm,
macroevolution is simply microevolution extended over a long period of time.
Paleontologists now think that all theropods—and that includes the famous Tyrannosaurus rex—were covered with some form of feathers.
“The Four-Winged Dinosaur” can be seen online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/microraptor/program.html.
scientists have managed to obtain fragments of the protein collagen from a 68 million-year-old fossil of T. rex, and determined the amino acid sequence of these fragments.
The analysis shows that T. rex is more closely related to living birds (chickens and ostriches) than to any other living vertebrates. The pattern confirms what scientists have long suspected: all the dinosaurs went extinct except for the one lineage that gave rise to birds.
Whales, which lack external ears, also have nonfunctional ear muscles (and sometimes tiny, useless ear openings) inherited from their land-mammal ancestors.
For an animation of continental drift over the last 150 million years, see http://mulinet6.li.mahidol.ac.th/cd-rom/cd-rom0309t/Evolution_files/platereconanim.gif. More comprehensive animations over earth’s entire history are at http://www.scotese.com/.
graphic video of Japanese hornets preying on introduced honeybees, and being cooked to death by defending Japanese honeybees, can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcZCttPGyJ0.
Carl Zimmer’s Parasite Rex recounts many other fascinating (and horrifying) ways that parasites have evolved to manipulate their hosts.
It’s not yet known how a falling ant can control the direction of its glide, but you can see videos of this remarkable behavior at http://www.canopyants.com/video1.html.
For a description of the long tongue and how it probably evolved by natural selection, see http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/woodpecker/woodpecker.html.
Neanderthals had red hair.
The earliest sexually reproducing creature so far identified is a red alga aptly named Bangiomorpha pubescens. Two sexes are clearly visible in its fossils from 1.2 billion years ago.
C. Turney. 2006. Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9DIMhKotWU&NR=1 shows a chimp walking awkwardly on two legs.
See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/07/1/1_071_03.html for a video clip of
See http://www.tallcorigins.org/faqs/homs/compare.html for a discussion of how creationists treat the human fossil record.
Biologists have identified at least two genes responsible for much of the difference in skin pigmentation between European and African populations.
natural selection increased the expression of amylase-1 by favoring the duplication of genes that produce
Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters.
