ext_23778 ([identity profile] davegodfrey.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] matgb 2007-11-30 11:37 am (UTC)

Wot [personal profile] innerbrat said

Darwin himself was adamant that natural selection was never meant to be the only mechanism of evolution, although this has pretty much become evolutionist dogma.

No it hasn't. Darwin came up with Sexual Selection, which has become an active area of research since the New Synthesis in the 1930s. Mootoo Kimura's Neutral theory of genetic evolution is very important in DNA classification studies. Then there's non-adaptationism, beloved of Stephen Jay Gould, and evo-devo.

But at the root of all this is the idea that organisms vary, and these variations have different fitnesses which affect their reproductive success.

Evolution is a fact and a theory. Fossils show that living organisms change through time. Natural Selection (in addition to the things I mentioned) is the model that explains how this happenned.

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