Search results
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution (the idea that species arose through descent with modification from a single common ancestor in a process driven by natural selection) initially met opposition from scientists with different ...
It is a common misunderstanding that evolution includes an explanation of life’s origins. Conversely, some of the theory’s critics complain that it cannot explain the origin of life. The theory does not try to explain the origin of life. The theory of evolution explains how populations change over time and how life diversifies—the origin ...
People also ask
What are the criticisms of evolutionary psychology?
Why is evolutionary psychology so controversial?
Do critics of evolutionary psychology base their criticisms on a priori political assumptions?
Why was evolution so controversial?
- Overview
- Correct: How natural selection works within species
- Correct: How natural selection creates new species, generally speaking
- Correct: Darwin’s lines of evidence to support the theory
- Incorrect: Earth’s age
- Incorrect: The mechanisms of variation among individuals
(Read T. H. Huxley’s 1875 Britannica essay on evolution & biology.)
Anagenesis is the technical term for an evolutionary change in a group in which one species replaces another but branching into separate species does not take place. It can be argued that as a species travels through time, it continually adapts to its environment. The traits of individuals that do not survive long enough to reproduce fade from the ...
Speciation, the creation of new and distinct species in the course of evolution, is simply an extension of anagenesis, but with branching allowed. Speciation also involves natural selection, but it is most easily seen in populations. If one or more populations are isolated from the rest of a species over many generations (and members of each isolat...
One of the hallmarks of good theory construction is the use of separate lines of evidence as proof. To lend support to his theory of natural selection, Darwin took examples from biogeography, paleontology, embryology, and morphology. He noted several examples of “closely-allied species” (that is, closely related species that likely descended or branched off from a common parent species) inhabiting the same territory or adjacent territories. He noted that different zebra species were found together on the plains of East Africa and, in perhaps his most famous example, that several living species of Galapagos finches co-occurred in the Galapagos Islands—a cluster of isolated islands in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The pattern of such closely related species in space supported the idea that these species had a similar origin. Darwin also noticed patterns of closely related species clustering in time. The fossil record showed several examples of similar-looking species occurring next to one another in the same layer or in successive layers of rock. Evidence of the influence of natural selection also appeared in developing embryos, where structures observed during the early stages of development of the higher vertebrates (fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) resembled the structures of more-primitive animals.
Darwin also leveraged morphology (that is, the general aspects of biological form and arrangement of the parts of a plant or an animal) to support his theory. Taxonomy, the classification of different forms of life, is rooted in the observable traits that group individual living things into species, genus, family, and so on. Generally speaking, the more traits different forms of life share, the closer their evolutionary relationship is. Through the process of taxonomy (which involves comparing the observable traits of living forms with the same kinds of traits in fossils), one can develop a decent understanding of the ways different lines of plants, animals, and other forms of life emerged across time.
During the 19th century the Bible (not the fossil record) was widely considered the primary authority on Earth’s age. It held that Earth was only about 6,000 years old. Most scientists of the time, however, acknowledged that Earth was certainly older. By the early 1860s, just a few years after On the Origin of Species was published, Scottish engine...
Although Darwin’s theory of natural selection was basically correct, in the late 1860s he proposed a theory that was very wrong. That theory—”pangenesis”—was an attempt to explain variation among individuals in a species. Offspring in sexual species display a mix of traits from both of their parents. Siblings look different from one another, but th...
- John P. Rafferty
Mar 17, 2016 · In a sample of academics (N = 111), we quantified the dimensions underlying criticisms of evolutionary psychology in relation to criticisms of its parent fields (i.e., general psychology and evolutionary biology) and examined how various demographic and sociopolitical individual differences were related to these criticism dimensions. The five primary criticisms of evolutionary psychology ...
- Peter K. Jonason, David P. Schmitt
- 2016
Jun 17, 2019 · This entry offers a broad historical review of the origin and development of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection through the initial Darwinian phase of the “Darwinian Revolution” up to the publication of the Descent of Man in 1871. The development of evolutionary ideas before Darwin’s work has been treated in the separate ...
Criticism of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology seeks to identify and understand human psychological traits that have evolved in much the same way as biological traits, through adaptation to environmental cues. Furthermore, it tends toward viewing the vast majority of psychological traits, certainly the most important ones, as the ...
Evolutionary psychology has emerged over the past 15 years as a major theoretical perspective, generating an increasing volume of empirical studies and assuming a larger presence within psychological science. At the same time, it has generated critiques and remains controversial among some psychologists. Some of the controversy stems from hypotheses that go against traditional psychological ...
