The Truth Bar » History Lessons

November 5th, 2009 by Administrator

If it’s true that the distinctions between the higher groupings called Classes and Sub-kingdoms might be accounted for in the same way is a much more difficult question. The differences that separate the fish, reptiles, birds and mammals from one another, though immense, even appear to be of a similar nature as those which describe a mouse from an elephant or a swallow from a parrot. We observe that the vertebrate animals and the insects are so largely distinct in their form and structure and in the very design of their bodily structure, that protesters may not wonder whether it true that they can all have been derived from a single common ancestor by way of the very same laws that explicate the distinction of the different species of birds or of reptiles.

Prior to Darwin, the large majority of natural scientists held firmly to the opinion that species were ontologically produced, and had not been derived from other species by any action known to us. There was, then, no dubiousness relating to the lineage of families, orders, and classes, given that the “origin of species” was thought to be an unsolvable problem. But now this is all changed. The whole scientific and literary world admits, as a thing of commonplace knowledge, the origin of species from other related species by the routine process of natural birth.

We might expect a trusted theory will allow us to grasp and follow up in some detail those changes in the form, structure, and relations of animals and plants that are effected in short periods of time, geologically speaking, and which are now going on around us. We may expect our theory to explain satisfactorily most of the small-scale and superficial differences which differentiate one species from another. And, finally, we might require that it explain many troubles and to reconcile many incongruities in the overly complex phylogenetic relations and relations of living things. All this the Darwinian Theory undoubtedly does. It exhibits how, by way of some of the most universal and ever-acting laws in nature, new species are needfully created, while the old species become extinct. Evolution theory likewise enables us to realize how the perpetual processes of these laws during the long periods is calculated to bring about those greater differences demonstrated by the distinct genera, families, and orders into which all living things are classified by naturalists.

Fortunately the heaviness of this subject has been buoyed up with a good dose of evolution humor, cropping up on web sites and office doors. See some of this evolution humor here.