Charles Darwin: The Man Behind the Ape | The Creation Research Institute (2023)

FAQs

Who was the man responsible for the theory of Darwinism? ›

The theory of evolution is a shortened form of the term “theory of evolution by natural selection,” which was proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the nineteenth century.

The five theories were: (1) evolution as such, (2) common descent, (3) gradualism, (4) multiplication of species, and (5) natural selection.

In the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin says little about human evolution, other than to assert firmly that we humans did evolve and are part of the interrelated natural world along with all other organisms.

Thomas Malthus and Charles Lyell were two figures who influenced Darwin's theories. Malthus argued that there was never enough food to keep up with human population growth, so humans would always suffer from famine and misery. Evolution occurs, organisms change over time.

Darwin was influenced by other early thinkers, including Lamarck, Lyell, and Malthus. Darwin was also influenced by his knowledge of artificial selection. Wallace's paper on evolution confirmed Darwin's ideas.

Humans diverged from apes (chimpanzees, specifically) toward the end of the Miocene ~9.3 million to 6.5 million years ago. Understanding the origins of the human lineage (hominins) requires reconstructing the morphology, behavior, and environment of the chimpanzee-human last common ancestor.

Darwin proposed that species can change over time, that new species come from pre-existing species, and that all species share a common ancestor. In this model, each species has its own unique set of heritable (genetic) differences from the common ancestor, which have accumulated gradually over very long time periods.

There are four principles at work in evolution—variation, inheritance, selection and time.

Darwin's work had three major strengths: evidence of evolution, a mechanism for evolution, and the recognition that variation is important.

The Aquatic Ape Theory states that our ancestors once spent a significant part of their life in water. Presumably, early apes were plant and fruit eaters in tropical forests. Early hominids also ate aquatic food; at first mainly weeds and tubers, later sea shore animals, especially shellfish.

What is the proof of human evolution? ›

Evidence of Evolution

Millions of stone tools, figurines and paintings, footprints, and other traces of human behavior in the prehistoric record tell about where and how early humans lived and when certain technological innovations were invented.

Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.

Charles Darwin was inspired by Thomas Robert Malthus, a late-eighteenth-century economist. Malthus wrote, "Essay on the Principle of Population" (1798), which darwin examined. Thomas Malthus' inspired Darwin to refine natural selection by stating a reason for meaningful competition between members of the same species.

Darwin took his book, Principles of Geology, with him on the Beagle. In the book, Lyell argued that gradual geological processes have slowly shaped Earth's surface over very long periods of time. From this, Lyell inferred that Earth must be far older than most people believed.

In 1859, Darwin published his thoughts about evolution and natural selection in On the Origin of Species. It was as popular as it was controversial.

Charles Darwin arrived at many of his insights into evolution by studying the variations among species on the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. Darwin's original hypothesis has undergone extensive modification and expansion, but the central concepts stand firm.

In the early 19th century prior to Darwinism, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) proposed his theory of the transmutation of species, the first fully formed theory of evolution.

We evolved and descended from the common ancestor of apes, which lived and died in the distant past. This means that we are related to other apes and that we are apes ourselves. And alongside us, the other living ape species have also evolved from that same common ancestor, and exist today in the wild and zoos.

The First Humans

One of the earliest known humans is Homo habilis, or “handy man,” who lived about 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago in Eastern and Southern Africa.

Can humans breed with any other animals? ›

Ethical considerations preclude definitive research on the subject, but it's safe to say that human DNA has become so different from that of other animals that interbreeding would likely be impossible.

Evolution is only a theory. It is not a fact or a scientific law. Many people learned in elementary school that a theory falls in the middle of a hierarchy of certainty—above a mere hypothesis but below a law.

Modern humans originated in Africa within the past 200,000 years and evolved from their most likely recent common ancestor, Homo erectus, which means 'upright man' in Latin. Homo erectus is an extinct species of human that lived between 1.9 million and 135,000 years ago.

The three limitations of Darwin's theory concern the origin of DNA, the irreducible complexity of the cell, and the paucity of transitional species. Because of these limitations, the author predicts a paradigm shift away from evolution to an alternative explanation.

He is best remembered for his doctrine of social Darwinism, according to which the principles of evolution, including natural selection, apply to human societies, social classes, and individuals as well as to biological species developing over geologic time.

Darwin's theory consisted of two main points; 1) diverse groups of animals evolve from one or a few common ancestors; 2) the mechanism by which this evolution takes place is natural selection.

Weaknesses: His body will adapt to whatever means to make Darwin survive, but will not meet his desires in many situations. For example, during his fight with the Hulk, his body teleports him away from the battle rather than supplying a power that would allow him to defeat the Hulk.

The main drawbacks of Darwinism are: The mechanism of inheritance is not explained. Only the most adaptive and fittest organism can survive which is not true. It talks the inheritance of only favourable character which is also not always true.

Two weaknesses are the difficulty of confirming facts because of how slow evolution can occur in some cases, as well as not necessarily explaining the mechanisms of organisms as much as alternative theories, because evolutionary theories often focus instead on larger issues instead of the precise mechanisms.

What is the killer ape theory? ›

The killer ape theory or killer ape hypothesis is the theory that war and interpersonal aggression was the driving force behind human evolution. It was originated by Raymond Dart in the 1950s; it was developed further in African Genesis by Robert Ardrey in 1961.

Firstly, humans did not evolve from monkeys. Instead, monkeys and humans share a common ancestor from which both evolved around 25 million years ago. This evolutionary relationship is supported both by the fossil record and DNA analysis. A 2007 study showed that humans and rhesus monkeys share about 93% of their DNA.

In Asia, in 1891, Eugene Dubois (also a paleoanthropologist) discovered the first fossil of Homo erectus (meaning upright man), which appeared 1.8 million years ago. This fossil received several names. The best known are Pithecanthropus (ape-man) and Sinanthropus (Chinese-man).

Indeed, the pope recently reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church's view that “evolution in nature is not inconsistent” with church teaching on creation, pushing the debate on human origins back into the news.

Scientists have recently named a new species of human ancestor, Homo bodoensis. Dr. Mirjana Roksandic of the University of Winnipeg in Canada, led a team of researchers in reanalyzing fossils from Africa and Eurasia to precisely define the new species of ancestor.

A window has been opened into a unique ecosystem that once existed in northern Greenland. Sediment samples taken from the geological formation Kap København contained minute DNA fragments, dating back two million years into the Pliocene.

Even if evolution were, hypothetically, rejected, contested by new data, scientists would have to study hard to find an alternative natural explanation that was able to explain everything that evolution explains today plus the new data that contested it. Evolution is a fact and a well-supported scientific theory.

They point out that although all humans alive today have mitochondrial DNA passed on from a common ancestor—a so-called Mitochondrial Eve—this is just a tiny fraction of our total genetic material.

What is clear however, is that all organisms are dynamic and will continue to adapt to their unique environments to continue being successful. In short, we are still evolving.

Summary. Darwin's ideas conflicted with widely held beliefs, such as the idea that organisms never change and that the world was only about 6,000 years old. Darwin was influenced by other scientists, including Lamarck, Lyell, and Wallace.

What is Charles Darwin most famous for in science? ›

Darwin's greatest contribution to science is that he completed the Copernican Revolution by drawing out for biology the notion of nature as a system of matter in motion governed by natural laws. With Darwin's discovery of natural selection, the origin and adaptations of organisms were brought into the realm of science.

Charles Darwin was most fascinated by the finches that he studied on the Galapagos islands. These finches would become known as Darwin's finches and were used as his basis of the adaptive radiation theory.

Charles Darwin

Abstract. Darwin's contributions to evolutionary biology are well known, but his contributions to genetics are much less known. His main contribution was the collection of a tremendous amount of genetic data, and an attempt to provide a theoretical framework for its interpretation.

Contrary to common perception, which is reflected in Mr. Singh's statement, Darwin did not say that humans directly evolved from apes. He merely pointed out the similarities between birds, fishes, mammals and reptiles and suggested that all life is related.

Given that relationship, he figured, early human ancestors probably lived in Africa. Since then, Wood says, “the evidence has come in.” In the past century and a half, science has confirmed Darwin's prediction and pieced together a detailed account of our origins.

In a letter from December 19, 1860 addressed to his friend and colleague Friedrich Engels, Marx states that Darwin's book contains “the basis in natural history for our view.” In a different letter to activist Ferdinand Lassalle (January 16, 1861), Marx concludes that “Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a ...

Charles Darwin: Naturalist, Revolutionary, and Father of Evolution.

A number of them were influenced by the writings of Herbert Spencer, a British thinker. Referring to Darwin's work but using his own phrases such as “the struggle for existence” and “the survival of the fittest,” Spencer helped to popularize a theory known as Social Darwinism.

Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.

Who is the master of evolution? ›

On one hand, Aristotle's apparent metaphysical requirement that the soul-as-form (eidos) be permanent and enduring through the process of the generation of “like by like” seemed for much of the tradition to amount to a denial of the possibility that natural species could change over time in their essential properties, ...

Abstract. In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Steven Pinker maintains that at present there are three competing views of human nature—a Christian theory, a “blank slate” theory (what I call a social constructivist theory), and a Darwinian theory—and that the last of these will triumph in the end.

Critics of Social Darwinism, including John Dewey and William James, rejected the notion that the process of social and economic change should occur unregulated, arguing that government should intervene to address the social ills that accompanied industrial development.

With Social Darwinism gaining popularity, inequality gained a strong foothold in the society driven by concepts of eugenics and racism. Around the 1900s, sizable populations around the world believed that the quality of human race should be improved by privileging the best human specimens (including themselves).

Social Darwinism was the notion that human groups and races are also subject to natural selection. The theory gained popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During that time, some people used social Darwinism to justify capitalist, imperialist, and racist policies.

It was Darwin who documented beyond doubt, in The Descent of Man, that all living humans belong to a unitary species with a single origin—which we now know, on the basis of evidence of which Darwin could never have dreamed, to have been around 200,000 years ago.

The human existence consists of three layers: 1) the layer of global quality of life (QOL), mental/physical health and ability, 2) the layer of love, power/consciousness and sexuality, and 3) the layer of existential coherence, where life inside the human being coheres with the outside world.