preview

Essay about Evolution

Good Essays

Charles Darwin had two great themes in "On the Origin of Species" which accounted for the similarities and adaptations

characteristic of living organisms. To account for the adaptations of organisms and those innumerable features that equip

them for survival and reproduction, Darwin (and Wallace) independently came up with the central theory of evolutionary

process: natural selection. Natural selection gives insight in to why organisms are the way that they are. Adaptations are

phenotypic variants that result in the highest fitness among a specified set of variants in a given environment. In reference

to humans, there are many traits that have been selected and adapted for throughout their evolutionary history giving …show more content…

These

ideas together constitute our idea of the evolutionary theory. When you factor in all of these elements of evolution you can

view evolution as a "progressive development through time from simple to gradually more complex and more diverse

organisms" (Ayala, 1997).

Darwin devoted one single sentence in "The Origin of Species" to the controversial topic of human evolution: "Light

will be thrown on the origin of man and his history"(Futuyma, 1998). Although his evasion did not work, human evolution

is still a controversial topic today. Since this area is so controversial there have been many studies conducted in the area

of human evolution. These evolutionary studies have provided us with abundant, well-documented evidence on the

relationship of humans to other species, on the steps by which some human characteristics evolved, and on genetic

variation within and among human populations.

Some theorists believe that natural selection of random changes in nucleic acid sequences and genetic information are

the primary agents of evolution. In a study done by J.L. Mountain and L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, it was shown that natural

selection may have played a major role in the evolution of certain polymorphisms in humans. It was found that the

frequencies of ancestral alleles of humans strengthen the conclusion that the earliest major separation of modern humans

was

Get Access