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Darwin worked out a theory for how evolution works with supporting evidence. The idea of evolution had been around for a while due to similarities between anima

Darwin worked out a theory for how evolution works with supporting evidence. The idea of evolution had been around for a while due to similarities between animals and due to paleontology. But many scientists ridiculed it until Darwin had his convincing theory and evidence. One of the biggest opponents pre-Darwin was Cuvier: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Cuvier

joering2 10y ago
Any idea where it might be going? Is is possible the evolution pretty much stopped with humans? Someone told me that AI/technology implanted into humans will be next movement for evolution but looking back that's not how evolution evolved no?
- christophilus 10y ago
  Evolution, by definition, will never stop, so long as there is life. It is the way life works. It doesn't mean progress towards some arbitrary goal, such as intelligence or strength. It means fitness for the current environment. You might argue that the cockroach is one of the most successful products of evolution.
  - azakai 10y ago
    Evolution in the sense that Darwin meant it - natural selection - does depend on some specific details of life. Namely, there must be variation in the species, the variation must be heritable, and there must be something that causes some of the species to produce more offspring. Without one of those, natural selection stops. In theory, life might exist without one of them - if we live forever and stop having children, or if we all have the same amount of children, or if we design our children's genes artificially, etc.
    - svachalek 10y ago
      Who is "we"? All life on earth? Even "we" as humanity is a colony organism; we have more non-human cells in our bodies than human ones.
      - milkytron 10y ago
        Could you please elaborate on this part: > we have more non-human cells in our bodies than human ones. I'm not the most educated in biology, but I thought if a cell is created in our body by our body, it is a human cell. Is this wrong to think?
        azakai 10y ago
        Depends what you mean by "created in our body by our body." Your body begins with a single human cell, then divides and grows. All those cells have your human DNA. But at some point bacterial cells also appear as part of your body, for example in your digestive tract, playing important roles you can't live without. Their source is not from your human cells, but they still form part of your body as a whole, in a sense.
        taco_emoji 10y ago
        They're speaking of the multitudinous microorganisms which live in and on our bodies.
  - nogridbag 10y ago
    The parent's question is pretty common and the answer given by scientists is always "Yes we're still evolving" but while it technically may be correct I think it gives people the wrong impression - like we could possibly grow a tail in 500-1000 years. I'm no expert by any means, but my understanding is that usually there needs to be some event that causes one species to diverge significantly. For example, if some percent of the population of some land dwelling animal becomes trapped on an island due to some geological activity, those that are better jumpers may be more fit for that new environment to survive like you stated (either to obtain food or avoid the common predators on that island). And thus over a period of hundreds or thousands of years in which they are separated on that island from the rest of their species, they will slowly evolve to be categorized as a new species. But I can't see humans evolving to become a vastly different looking species (which is the layman's definition of an "evolved" species) since we are now a global population and our physical abilities do not determine our fitness to survive unless there was some global killer such as climate change which significantly changes civilization as we know it (e.g. we go back to being hunter/gatherers).
    - vidarh 10y ago
      It can be something relatively small. The trait for blond hair in Northern Europe dates back only ca. 11,000 years, and the benefit is unclear (it may be related to vitamin D). Keep in mind that it only needs to benefit survival a bit more than it hinders it. If it provides a big adantage, it will spread rapidly, but as long as it provides some advantage it stands a chance of surviving long enough to get a foothold and keep spreading. Even if it doesn't provide any advantage, as long as it doesn't have a negative effect it still has a shot at spreading if it just happens to occur in a population that's otherwise successful. > since we are now a global population and our physical abilities do not determine our fitness to survive Our fitness also involves our ability to select a mate and have offspring, not just physical survival. It could very well be that our ability to select a mate will over long enough time scales be affected by appearance and changing cultural factors.
      - Amezarak 10y ago
        As you allude later on, selection for environmental fitness is not the only form of selection. Blonde hair need not confer a survival advantage if at one point it conferred a reproductive advantage. That's sexual selection. In some cases, traits can be disadvantageous in terms of survival but immensely advantageous reproductively.
- cossatot 10y ago
  Humans are a very tiny part of the biosphere. Evolution is certainly ongoing in all of the world's organisms. Humanity's biggest role in this is of course our outsized environmental impacts which place new selection pressures on life, not freezing genomes in their current state or replacing grey matter with GPUs or whatever. It's also important to consider the timescales involved in this--often hundreds of thousands to millions of years. However it's not necessarily a gradual, continuous process either. I read a lot 15-20 years ago about 'puncutated equilibrium', which basically states that species in an ecological region stay pretty constant until some relatively brief event (such as climate change or the introduction of a new predator) causes everything to adapt very rapidly to the new conditions, and then another period of stability sets in. Stephen Jay Gould wrote about this quite a bit for the lay reader and I believe did a lot of the theoretical development when he was a younger scientist. Whe I was in grad school, my paleontologist friends tended to scoff at it so it might not be in vogue but the books are still worth reading even if possibly dated. The other observation that Gould promotes a bit is that evolution is quite chaotic and that most genera and species simply get out competed and die off instead of morphing into something new. My hunch is that we're forcing quite rapid evolution right now, mostly due to habitat loss and substantial modification of ecosystems (i.e. monoculture fields, removal of alpha predators on land), and climate change will increase in importance throughout the next century. The real next movement of evolution will probably be the repopulation of earth by pollution-resistant creatures after we've killed ourselves and taken a good chunk of life with us.
- pawn 10y ago
  Watch the documentary called Idiocracy by Mike Judge for a good idea of where it's going.
- jaimebuelta 10y ago
  Currently evolution is understood as the change in variability of genes over a population. The presence of a gene that generates a beneficial trait tends to grow (due natural selection), but the distribution of genes is never static over generations...
- Angostura 10y ago
  Well, there was an interesting story the other day that the increased number of caesarean births appears to be having an affect on babies birth head diameter. Natural selection (or rather lack thereof) in action.
hodgesrm 10y ago
Thanks for a great link. Cuvier was an impressive scientist. I suspect he was a particular formidable opponent of evolution because his objections were based on factual evidence such as observations of the fossil record as well as the cited studies of mummified animals. It's equally impressive how many things he got right, such as the idea of extinction events at periodic intervals among many others. Given the uncertainty of scientific knowledge at the time you have to wonder how well today's scientists would have performed in his shoes.

joering2 10y ago

Any idea where it might be going? Is is possible the evolution pretty much stopped with humans? Someone told me that AI/technology implanted into humans will be next movement for evolution but looking back that's not how evolution evolved no?

christophilus 10y ago
Evolution, by definition, will never stop, so long as there is life. It is the way life works. It doesn't mean progress towards some arbitrary goal, such as intelligence or strength. It means fitness for the current environment. You might argue that the cockroach is one of the most successful products of evolution.
- azakai 10y ago
  Evolution in the sense that Darwin meant it - natural selection - does depend on some specific details of life. Namely, there must be variation in the species, the variation must be heritable, and there must be something that causes some of the species to produce more offspring. Without one of those, natural selection stops. In theory, life might exist without one of them - if we live forever and stop having children, or if we all have the same amount of children, or if we design our children's genes artificially, etc.
  - svachalek 10y ago
    Who is "we"? All life on earth? Even "we" as humanity is a colony organism; we have more non-human cells in our bodies than human ones.
    - milkytron 10y ago
      Could you please elaborate on this part: > we have more non-human cells in our bodies than human ones. I'm not the most educated in biology, but I thought if a cell is created in our body by our body, it is a human cell. Is this wrong to think?
      - azakai 10y ago
        Depends what you mean by "created in our body by our body." Your body begins with a single human cell, then divides and grows. All those cells have your human DNA. But at some point bacterial cells also appear as part of your body, for example in your digestive tract, playing important roles you can't live without. Their source is not from your human cells, but they still form part of your body as a whole, in a sense.
      - taco_emoji 10y ago
        They're speaking of the multitudinous microorganisms which live in and on our bodies.
- nogridbag 10y ago
  The parent's question is pretty common and the answer given by scientists is always "Yes we're still evolving" but while it technically may be correct I think it gives people the wrong impression - like we could possibly grow a tail in 500-1000 years. I'm no expert by any means, but my understanding is that usually there needs to be some event that causes one species to diverge significantly. For example, if some percent of the population of some land dwelling animal becomes trapped on an island due to some geological activity, those that are better jumpers may be more fit for that new environment to survive like you stated (either to obtain food or avoid the common predators on that island). And thus over a period of hundreds or thousands of years in which they are separated on that island from the rest of their species, they will slowly evolve to be categorized as a new species. But I can't see humans evolving to become a vastly different looking species (which is the layman's definition of an "evolved" species) since we are now a global population and our physical abilities do not determine our fitness to survive unless there was some global killer such as climate change which significantly changes civilization as we know it (e.g. we go back to being hunter/gatherers).
  - vidarh 10y ago
    It can be something relatively small. The trait for blond hair in Northern Europe dates back only ca. 11,000 years, and the benefit is unclear (it may be related to vitamin D). Keep in mind that it only needs to benefit survival a bit more than it hinders it. If it provides a big adantage, it will spread rapidly, but as long as it provides some advantage it stands a chance of surviving long enough to get a foothold and keep spreading. Even if it doesn't provide any advantage, as long as it doesn't have a negative effect it still has a shot at spreading if it just happens to occur in a population that's otherwise successful. > since we are now a global population and our physical abilities do not determine our fitness to survive Our fitness also involves our ability to select a mate and have offspring, not just physical survival. It could very well be that our ability to select a mate will over long enough time scales be affected by appearance and changing cultural factors.
    - Amezarak 10y ago
      As you allude later on, selection for environmental fitness is not the only form of selection. Blonde hair need not confer a survival advantage if at one point it conferred a reproductive advantage. That's sexual selection. In some cases, traits can be disadvantageous in terms of survival but immensely advantageous reproductively.
cossatot 10y ago
Humans are a very tiny part of the biosphere. Evolution is certainly ongoing in all of the world's organisms. Humanity's biggest role in this is of course our outsized environmental impacts which place new selection pressures on life, not freezing genomes in their current state or replacing grey matter with GPUs or whatever. It's also important to consider the timescales involved in this--often hundreds of thousands to millions of years. However it's not necessarily a gradual, continuous process either. I read a lot 15-20 years ago about 'puncutated equilibrium', which basically states that species in an ecological region stay pretty constant until some relatively brief event (such as climate change or the introduction of a new predator) causes everything to adapt very rapidly to the new conditions, and then another period of stability sets in. Stephen Jay Gould wrote about this quite a bit for the lay reader and I believe did a lot of the theoretical development when he was a younger scientist. Whe I was in grad school, my paleontologist friends tended to scoff at it so it might not be in vogue but the books are still worth reading even if possibly dated. The other observation that Gould promotes a bit is that evolution is quite chaotic and that most genera and species simply get out competed and die off instead of morphing into something new. My hunch is that we're forcing quite rapid evolution right now, mostly due to habitat loss and substantial modification of ecosystems (i.e. monoculture fields, removal of alpha predators on land), and climate change will increase in importance throughout the next century. The real next movement of evolution will probably be the repopulation of earth by pollution-resistant creatures after we've killed ourselves and taken a good chunk of life with us.
pawn 10y ago
Watch the documentary called Idiocracy by Mike Judge for a good idea of where it's going.
jaimebuelta 10y ago
Currently evolution is understood as the change in variability of genes over a population. The presence of a gene that generates a beneficial trait tends to grow (due natural selection), but the distribution of genes is never static over generations...
Angostura 10y ago
Well, there was an interesting story the other day that the increased number of caesarean births appears to be having an affect on babies birth head diameter. Natural selection (or rather lack thereof) in action.

hodgesrm 10y ago

Thanks for a great link. Cuvier was an impressive scientist. I suspect he was a particular formidable opponent of evolution because his objections were based on factual evidence such as observations of the fossil record as well as the cited studies of mummified animals. It's equally impressive how many things he got right, such as the idea of extinction events at periodic intervals among many others. Given the uncertainty of scientific knowledge at the time you have to wonder how well today's scientists would have performed in his shoes.