THEORIES OF HUMAN EVOLUTION

Creationism
Creationism is the religious belief that the Universe and life originated "from specific
acts of divine creation." For young Earth creationists, this includes a biblical
literalist interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative and the rejection of
the scientific theory of evolution. As the history of evolutionary thought developed from
the 18th century on, various views aimed at reconciling the Abrahamic and Genesis
with biology and other sciences developed in Western culture. Those holding
that species had been created separately (such as Philip Gosse in 1857) were generally
called "advocates of creation" but were also called "creationists," as in private
correspondence between Charles Darwin and his friends. As the controversy developed
over time, the term "anti-evolutionists" became common. In 1929 in the United States,
the term "creationism" first became associated with Christian fundamentalists,
specifically with their rejection of human evolution and belief in a young Earth
although this usage was contested by other groups, such as old Earth
creationists and evolutionary creationists, who hold different concepts of creation, such
as the acceptance of the age of the Earth and biological evolution as understood by
the scientific community.

Catastrophism
Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by
sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. This was in
contrast to uniformitarianism (sometimes described as gradualism), in which slow
incremental changes, such as erosion, created all the Earth's geological features.
Uniformitarianism held that the present is the key to the past, and that all things
continued as they were from the indefinite past. Since the early disputes, a more
inclusive and integrated view of geologic events has developed, in which
the scientific consensus accepts that there were some catastrophic events in the
geologic past, but these were explicable as extreme examples of natural processes
which can occur.
Catastrophism held that geological epochs had ended with violent and sudden
natural catastrophes such as great floods and the rapid formation of major
mountain chains. Plants and animals living in the parts of the world where such
events occurred were killed off, being replaced abruptly by the new forms whose
fossils defined the geological strata. Some catastrophists attempted to relate at
least one such change to the Biblical account of Noah's flood.
The concept was first popularized by the early 19th-century French scientist Georges
Cuvier, who proposed that new life forms had moved in from other areas after local
floods, and avoided religious or metaphysical speculation in his scientific writings.

TRANSFORMISM

Transformism is a mechanistic doctrine which explains the appearance of living

beings by the sole action of natural causes, working without any kind of direction,
and without any end in view.

Natural selection
Natural selection is one of the basic mechanisms of evolution, along with
mutation, migration, and genetic drift.
Darwin's grand idea of evolution by natural selection is relatively simple but often
misunderstood. To find out how it works, imagine a population of beetles:

1. There is variation in traits.

For example, some beetles are green and some are

brown.

2. There is differential reproduction.

Since the environment can't support unlimited population growth, not all individuals get to
their full potential. In this example, green beetles tend to
get eaten by bi
to reproduce less often than brown beetles do.

3. There is heredity.
The surviving brown beetles have brown baby beetles

4. End result:
The more advantageous trait, brown coloration, which
offspring, becomes more common in the population. If
individuals in the population will be brown.

because this tra

allows the beet

this process co

If you have variation, differential reproduction, and heredity, you will have
evolution by natural selection as an outcome. It is as simple as that.

The Process of Natural Selection

Darwins process of natural selection has four components.
1. Variation. Organisms (within populations) exhibit individual variation in
appearance and behavior. These variations may involve body size, hair color,
facial markings, voice properties, or number of offspring. On the other hand,
some traits show little to no variation among individualsfor example,
number of eyes in vertebrates.
2. Inheritance. Some traits are consistently passed on from parent to offspring.
Such traits are heritable, whereas other traits are strongly influenced by
environmental conditions and show weak heritability.
3. High rate of population growth. Most populations have more offspring each
year than local resources can support leading to a struggle for resources.
Each generation experiences substantial mortality.
4. Differential survival and reproduction. Individuals possessing traits well
suited for the struggle for local resources will contribute more offspring to the
next generation.
From one generation to the next, the struggle for resources (what Darwin called the
struggle for existence) will favor individuals with some variations over others and
thereby change the frequency of traits within the population. This process is natural
selection. The traits that confer an advantage to those individuals who leave more
offspring are called adaptations.
In order for natural selection to operate on a trait, the trait must possess heritable
variation and must confer an advantage in the competition for resources. If one of
these requirements does not occur, then the trait does not experience natural
selection. (We now know that such traits may change by other evolutionary
mechanisms that have been discovered since Darwins time.)
Natural selection operates by comparative advantage, not an absolute standard of
design. as natural selection acts by competition for resources, it adapts the
inhabitants of each country only in relation to the degree of perfection of their
associates (Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859).
During the twentieth century, genetics was integrated with Darwins mechanism,
allowing us to evaluate natural selection as the differential survival and
reproduction of genotypes, corresponding to particular phenotypes. Natural
selection can only work on existing variation within a population. Such variations
arise by mutation, a change in some part of the genetic code for a trait. Mutations
arise by chance and without foresight for the potential advantage or disadvantage
of the mutation. In other words, variations do not arise because they are needed.