Monday, February 12, 2007

Happy Birthday Charles Darwin

"...how natural selection works.3
  1. Evolution: Organisms change through time. Both the fossil record of life’s history, and nature today document and reveal this change.
  2. Descent with modification: Evolution proceeds via branching through common descent. Offspring are similar to but not exact replicas of their parents. This produces the necessary variation to allow for adaptation to an ever-changing environment.
  3. Gradualism: Change is slow, steady, and stately. Given enough time, evolution accounts for species change.
  4. Multiplication of speciation: Evolution does not just produce new species; it produces an increasing number of new species.
  5. Natural selection: The process of evolutionary change, co-discovered by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, which operates in the following manner:
  1. Populations tend to increase indefinitely in a geometric ratio: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024…
  2. In a natural environment, however, population numbers stabilize at a certain level.
  3. Therefore, there must be a “struggle for existence” because not all of the organisms produced can survive.
  4. There is variation in every species.
  5. In the struggle for existence, those individuals with variations that are better adapted to the environment leave behind more offspring than individuals that are less well adapted. This is known as differential reproductive success.
Yeah, it's impossible at times to present something here on Booger without mucking up the format, but all intelligent men of good will must agree upon certain things and this happens to be one of them.

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