Evolutionary theory of dating

Evolution Theory And Dating: Evolution drives a lot of our dating behavior. Here are some of my favorite observations about it.
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Theistic evolution was the idea that God intervened in the process of evolution, to guide it in such a way that the living world could still be considered to be designed. However, this idea gradually fell out of favor among scientists, as they became more and more committed to the idea of methodological naturalism and came to believe that direct appeals to supernatural involvement were scientifically unproductive. By , theistic evolution had largely disappeared from professional scientific discussions, although it retained a strong popular following.


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In the late 19th century, the term neo-Lamarckism came to be associated with the position of naturalists who viewed the inheritance of acquired characteristics as the most important evolutionary mechanism. They considered Lamarckism to be philosophically superior to Darwin's idea of selection acting on random variation. Cope looked for, and thought he found, patterns of linear progression in the fossil record. Inheritance of acquired characteristics was part of Haeckel's recapitulation theory of evolution, which held that the embryological development of an organism repeats its evolutionary history.

Despite these criticisms, neo-Lamarckism remained the most popular alternative to natural selection at the end of the 19th century, and would remain the position of some naturalists well into the 20th century. Orthogenesis was the hypothesis that life has an innate tendency to change, in a unilinear fashion, towards ever-greater perfection. It had a significant following in the 19th century, and its proponents included the Russian biologist Leo S.

Why You Date Who You Date: Evolutionary Psychology Explains

Berg and the American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Orthogenesis was popular among some paleontologists, who believed that the fossil record showed a gradual and constant unidirectional change.

Saltationism was the idea that new species arise as a result of large mutations. It was seen as a much faster alternative to the Darwinian concept of a gradual process of small random variations being acted on by natural selection, and was popular with early geneticists such as Hugo de Vries , William Bateson , and early in his career, Thomas Hunt Morgan. It became the basis of the mutation theory of evolution. The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel 's laws of inheritance in ignited a fierce debate between two camps of biologists. In one camp were the Mendelians , who were focused on discrete variations and the laws of inheritance.

They were led by William Bateson who coined the word genetics and Hugo de Vries who coined the word mutation. Their opponents were the biometricians , who were interested in the continuous variation of characteristics within populations. Their leaders, Karl Pearson and Walter Frank Raphael Weldon , followed in the tradition of Francis Galton , who had focused on measurement and statistical analysis of variation within a population.

The biometricians rejected Mendelian genetics on the basis that discrete units of heredity, such as genes, could not explain the continuous range of variation seen in real populations.

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Weldon's work with crabs and snails provided evidence that selection pressure from the environment could shift the range of variation in wild populations, but the Mendelians maintained that the variations measured by biometricians were too insignificant to account for the evolution of new species.

When Thomas Hunt Morgan began experimenting with breeding the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster , he was a saltationist who hoped to demonstrate that a new species could be created in the lab by mutation alone. Instead, the work at his lab between and reconfirmed Mendelian genetics and provided solid experimental evidence linking it to chromosomal inheritance. His work also demonstrated that most mutations had relatively small effects, such as a change in eye color, and that rather than creating a new species in a single step, mutations served to increase variation within the existing population.

The Mendelian and biometrician models were eventually reconciled with the development of population genetics. A key step was the work of the British biologist and statistician Ronald Fisher. In a series of papers starting in and culminating in his book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection , Fisher showed that the continuous variation measured by the biometricians could be produced by the combined action of many discrete genes, and that natural selection could change gene frequencies in a population, resulting in evolution.

In a series of papers beginning in , another British geneticist, J. Haldane, applied statistical analysis to real-world examples of natural selection, such as the evolution of industrial melanism in peppered moths , and showed that natural selection worked at an even faster rate than Fisher assumed. The American biologist Sewall Wright, who had a background in animal breeding experiments, focused on combinations of interacting genes, and the effects of inbreeding on small, relatively isolated populations that exhibited genetic drift.

Fossils and Evidence for Evolution - Biology for All - FuseSchool

In , Wright introduced the concept of an adaptive landscape and argued that genetic drift and inbreeding could drive a small, isolated sub-population away from an adaptive peak, allowing natural selection to drive it towards different adaptive peaks. The work of Fisher, Haldane and Wright founded the discipline of population genetics.

This integrated natural selection with Mendelian genetics, which was the critical first step in developing a unified theory of how evolution worked. In the first few decades of the 20th century, most field naturalists continued to believe that alternative mechanisms of evolution such as Lamarckism and orthogenesis provided the best explanation for the complexity they observed in the living world.

But as the field of genetics continued to develop, those views became less tenable. He helped to bridge the divide between the foundations of microevolution developed by the population geneticists and the patterns of macroevolution observed by field biologists, with his book Genetics and the Origin of Species. Dobzhansky examined the genetic diversity of wild populations and showed that, contrary to the assumptions of the population geneticists, these populations had large amounts of genetic diversity, with marked differences between sub-populations.

The book also took the highly mathematical work of the population geneticists and put it into a more accessible form. Ford , the pioneer of ecological genetics , continued throughout the s and s to demonstrate the power of selection due to ecological factors including the ability to maintain genetic diversity through genetic polymorphisms such as human blood types. Ford's work would contribute to a shift in emphasis during the course of the modern synthesis towards natural selection over genetic drift.

The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr was influenced by the work of the German biologist Bernhard Rensch showing the influence of local environmental factors on the geographic distribution of sub-species and closely related species. Mayr followed up on Dobzhansky's work with the book Systematics and the Origin of Species , which emphasized the importance of allopatric speciation in the formation of new species.

This form of speciation occurs when the geographical isolation of a sub-population is followed by the development of mechanisms for reproductive isolation. Mayr also formulated the biological species concept that defined a species as a group of interbreeding or potentially interbreeding populations that were reproductively isolated from all other populations. In the book Tempo and Mode in Evolution , George Gaylord Simpson showed that the fossil record was consistent with the irregular non-directional pattern predicted by the developing evolutionary synthesis, and that the linear trends that earlier paleontologists had claimed supported orthogenesis and neo-Lamarckism did not hold up to closer examination.

Ledyard Stebbins published Variation and Evolution in Plants , which helped to integrate botany into the synthesis. The emerging cross-disciplinary consensus on the workings of evolution would be known as the modern synthesis. It received its name from the book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis by Julian Huxley. The modern synthesis provided a conceptual core—in particular, natural selection and Mendelian population genetics—that tied together many, but not all, biological disciplines: It helped establish the legitimacy of evolutionary biology, a primarily historical science, in a scientific climate that favored experimental methods over historical ones.

The middle decades of the 20th century saw the rise of molecular biology , and with it an understanding of the chemical nature of genes as sequences of DNA and of their relationship—through the genetic code —to protein sequences. At the same time, increasingly powerful techniques for analyzing proteins, such as protein electrophoresis and sequencing , brought biochemical phenomena into realm of the synthetic theory of evolution.

By , Motoo Kimura and others provided a theoretical basis for the molecular clock, arguing that—at the molecular level at least—most genetic mutations are neither harmful nor helpful and that mutation and genetic drift rather than natural selection cause a large portion of genetic change: From the early s, molecular biology was increasingly seen as a threat to the traditional core of evolutionary biology.

Established evolutionary biologists—particularly Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, and George Gaylord Simpson, three of the architects of the modern synthesis—were extremely skeptical of molecular approaches, especially when it came to the connection or lack thereof to natural selection.

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The molecular-clock hypothesis and the neutral theory were particularly controversial, spawning the neutralist-selectionist debate over the relative importance of mutation, drift and selection, which continued into the s without a clear resolution. In the mids, George C. Williams strongly critiqued explanations of adaptations worded in terms of "survival of the species" group selection arguments. Such explanations were largely replaced by a gene-centered view of evolution, epitomized by the kin selection arguments of W.

Hamilton , George R. Price and John Maynard Smith. In , Leigh Van Valen proposed the term " Red Queen ," which he took from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll , to describe a scenario where a species involved in one or more evolutionary arms races would have to constantly change just to keep pace with the species with which it was co-evolving. Hamilton, Williams and others suggested that this idea might explain the evolution of sexual reproduction: However, contrary to the expectations of the Red Queen hypothesis, Hanley et al.

They considered that sex acts as a coarse filter, weeding out major genetic changes, such as chromosomal rearrangements, but permitting minor variation, such as changes at the nucleotide or gene level that are often neutral to pass through the sexual sieve. The adaptive function of sex, today, remains a major unresolved issue in biology.

The competing models to explain the adaptive function of sex were reviewed by Birdsell and Wills.

Why You Date Who You Date: Evolutionary Psychology Explains | Thought Catalog

The gene-centric view has also led to an increased interest in Charles Darwin's old idea of sexual selection, [] and more recently in topics such as sexual conflict and intragenomic conflict. Hamilton's work on kin selection contributed to the emergence of the discipline of sociobiology. The existence of altruistic behaviors has been a difficult problem for evolutionary theorists from the beginning.


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Other theories followed, some derived from game theory , such as reciprocal altruism. Wilson published the influential and highly controversial book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis which claimed evolutionary theory could help explain many aspects of animal, including human, behavior.

Critics of sociobiology, including Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin , claimed that sociobiology greatly overstated the degree to which complex human behaviors could be determined by genetic factors. They also claimed that the theories of sociobiologists often reflected their own ideological biases. Despite these criticisms, work has continued in sociobiology and the related discipline of evolutionary psychology , including work on other aspects of the altruism problem.

One of the most prominent debates arising during the s was over the theory of punctuated equilibrium. Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould proposed that there was a pattern of fossil species that remained largely unchanged for long periods what they termed stasis , interspersed with relatively brief periods of rapid change during speciation. Discoveries in biotechnology now allow the modification of entire genomes, advancing evolutionary studies to the level where future experiments may involve the creation of entirely synthetic organisms.