History of Evolutionary Theory

Early theories

The yin-yang and bagua theory in the Chinese I Ching reduced the natural world to the eight basic phenomena of heaven, earth, thunder, wind, water, fire, mountains, and zephyrs, and explained the complexity of the material world in terms of the yin-yang and bagua, which are the laws of change. and used "yin and yang" and "eight trigrams" to explain the complex laws of change in the material world. Liezi (about 450 years ago - about 375 years ago) for the ancient Chinese (Warring States period) famous thinker, he said in the "said Fu", "heaven and earth and all things, and I also born class. There is no nobility or inferiority in class, but they are only controlled by their size and intellect, and they eat each other repeatedly, and they are not born from each other's behavior. People take the edible and eat, is not the sky for the life of the original? And the gnat is skin, tigers and wolves eat meat, non-day for the gnats and tigers and wolves meat born of it. That is, Liezi believes that the relationship between species is by no means the result of the so-called purposeful design of the heavens, including human beings, the biological world is only a product of natural development, people are not more noble than other animals.

The ancient Greek Anaximander (circa 6th century BC) believed that life first arose from the soft mud of the sea. The primitive aquatic organisms underwent metamorphosis (similar to the molting of insect larvae) to become land creatures. He hypothesized that man arose from another animal, reasoning that while all other animals quickly sought food for themselves, man alone required a long period of lactation, and that he could not have survived if he had been as he is now in the beginning. He thought that man had arisen from the fish, and this may have been the conclusion of the ancients from the observation that the embryo of man bears some resemblance to a young fish .

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) of Ancient Greece said in the Book of Animals that "the progress of nature from the inanimate to the animal is a gradual and cumulative process, so that by reason of its continuity it is difficult for us to perceive the boundaries between these things and to which side the intermediates belong. After the inanimate comes first the vegetable class ...... The process of changing from such things to animals is continuous ...... ", and in On Plants it is said that "The world is a complete and continuous whole, which without a moment's pause creates animals, plants and all other kinds". He believed that life should evolve in the following way: non-life → plant → animal (this is called the "Great Chain of Being" by later generations), which is also generally in line with the knowledge based on modern science. The Darwinian evolutionary theory of the successive accumulation of small variations also seems to be the same as the Aristotelian view of the evolution of life as a cumulative process.

Religionistic Special Creationism

In the medieval West, the Christian Bible portrayed everything in the world as a special creation of God. This is special creationism or divine creationism. Creationism states that the entire natural world was created to reveal the glory of the Creator.

Intelligent Design Theory

Intelligent Design Theory, also known as Purpose Theory, is a form of theodicy due to the fact that Intelligent Design Theory in general has no God. Intelligent design theory is the claim that the world was necessarily created by a supernatural being who created and designed (these entities and) certain rules that cause these phenomena. These phenomena can be characterized primarily by irreducible complexity , specific complexity, and the fact that everything in the universe is ordered and conforms to laws. Several times after the cell membrane was shown to be a lipid-fused weak acid was disproved, and completely disproved in the face of the PAM matrix established by gene biology.

The Invariant Theory

From the Renaissance in the second half of the 15th century to the 18th century is the period of the formation and development of modern natural science. The view that dominated science during this period was the invariant theory. At that time this view was expressed by Newton and C.v Linnaeus as a law of science: the earth was set in motion due to the so-called first impulse, and afterward it moved forever unchanged, and living species were and will be so, and its also denied.

Vitalism

By the second half of the 18th century, I. Kant's theory of celestial bodies first opened the first gaps in the invariant view of nature; subsequently, the transformational view of nature gradually took shape in all areas of the natural sciences. Some biologists of this period were often torn between the two points of view.

For example, Linnaeus deleted the words of invariance of species in his book Systema Naturae in his later years; the French biologist G.-L.d e Buffon, although he brought the theory of transformation into biology, was torn between the theory of transformation and the theory of invariance throughout his life; J.-B.d e Lamarck in his book Philosophy of Animals published in 1809 elaborated his view of the theory of transformation of biology, and has never wavered. wavered.

In the late 18th - late 19th centuries, most zoologists did not seriously study biological evolution and deviated from the ancient Greek materialist tradition, falling into idealism.

The "vitalism" theory, while recognizing that biological species can be transformed, attributed the cause of evolution to immaterial internal forces, arguing that it was the "internal forces" of living beings, or vitality, that drove the evolution of organisms and made them more and more complex and perfect. Vitality theory lacks actual evidence and is merely an idealistic speculation. Later generations referred to Lamarck's view of biological evolution as Lamarckianism or Lamarckianism, and its main ideas were:

(1) Species are variable, and species are groups of individuals that vary.

(2) There is a series of grades (steps) from simple to complex in nature, and there is an inherent "force of will" in the organisms themselves that drives them from the lower grades to the higher grades.

(3) Organisms have a great ability to adapt to their environment; changes in the environment will cause changes in organisms, and organisms will improve their adaptations as a result; the diversity of the environment is the root cause of the multiplicity of organisms.

(4) Changes in the environment cause changes in the habits of animals; changes in habits cause certain organs to develop through regular use and others to deteriorate through non-use; directional variation, i.e., acquired traits, which occurs under the influence of the environment, is capable of being inherited. If the environment changes in a certain direction, due to the use of organs and acquired heredity, small variations gradually accumulate, finally allowing organisms to evolve.

Lamarck's doctrine of intrinsic will has an idealistic coloring; acquired traits are mostly phenotypic variations, and modern genetics has proved that they cannot be inherited--Lamarck's "theory of evolution by use and regression" is based on real observation and deduced from the theory of evolution. Lamarck's "theory of evolution by use" is based on real observation and deduced from evolutionary inheritance, which is the precursor of "labor creates man himself". The observational experiments from which modern genetics is drawn do not establish either that macroevolution occurs or that acquired traits are not heritable (the operative word: "may not occur"). The central difference between the two theories of evolution and genetics is that the theory of evolution holds that, for life, objective environmental exogenous and subjective endogenous selection for life interact with each other; the theory of genetics denies the existence of endogenous selection for life, and is an alternative theory of destiny being determined by God, constructed to avoid the flood of evolutionary theory. On July 1, 1858 C.R. Darwin and A.R. Wallace read a paper on evolution at the Linnaean Society in London. Later people called their doctrine of natural selection the Darwin-Wallace doctrine.

Main ideas

Darwin systematically elaborated his doctrine of evolution in his book The Origin of Species, published in 1859. Darwin himself called On the Origin of Species "a long argument," and it argued for two things:

First, that species are variable and organisms evolve. The vast majority of biologists who read On the Origin of Species at the time were quick to accept this fact, and evolution has since replaced creationism as the cornerstone of biological research. Even at that time, the debate about whether organisms evolved or not was primarily between biologists and Christian evangelists, rather than within the biological community.

Second, natural selection is the driving force behind biological evolution. Organisms have a tendency to overpopulate, and since living space and food are limited, they must "struggle for survival". Individuals in the same population there are variations, those with favorable variations that can adapt to the environment will survive and reproduce offspring, and individuals who do not have favorable variations will be eliminated. If the changes in natural conditions are directional, then in the course of history, after a long period of natural selection, small variations are accumulated and become significant. This may lead to the formation of subspecies and new species.

Theoretical flaws

The general criticism of the theory of evolution is that it lacks sufficient fossil evidence to account for "transitions" between species, but the 1937 book Genetics and the Origin of Species by T. Dobzhansky provides a solution.

Theoretically, if birds evolved from reptiles, there must have been a "transitional species" from reptiles to birds. Reptiles are cold-blooded, but the body temperature of birds is often maintained at a higher temperature than that of ordinary organisms, so how the intermediate transitional species could have balanced such physiological differences can only be guessed at. Through the large number of transitional species fossils found, and the Kong Fu Zi bird and other fossil evidence found shows that not only birds and dinosaurs once coexisted for a long time, and some dinosaurs were warm-blooded animals, there is an explanation that birds and dinosaurs are ancestors in the earlier point of time on the evolution of warm-blooded mechanism of lizards (transitional species), and then through this warm-blooded lizards to evolve a portion of warm-blooded dinosaurs, and then evolve the birds. There are many such "evolutionary sequence" and "transitional species" problems, and most of them have not been solved. The main reason for this is that most of the fictional transitional species have not been fully fossilized, including those closely related to human ancestors, such as the southern apes and the great apes, and the transition between the great apes and the upright walking apes.

According to the simulation, it is difficult to break the bottlenecks in biological evolution from "organisms to unicellular prokaryotes" and from "simple multicellular organisms to complex multicellular organisms that have undergone cellular differentiation". Moreover, a research paper, "Biology Has No Time to Wait", points out that these two problems aside. It took nearly 12 billion years for single-celled organisms to evolve by "favorable mutation of genes" to forms of life lower than primates, so this report argues that the evolutionary process could not have been completed entirely on Earth, a viewpoint that is fundamentally flawed by the genetic application of the "modern theory of synthetic evolution". "This idea arises from a fundamental flaw in the genetic application of "modern synthetic evolution," which denies that acquired traits can be inherited, and which cannot explain the problem of uniformly persistent mutations and the associated rate of evolution.

Because Darwin's classical theory of evolution had great limitations, twentieth-century scientists made drastic additions and modifications to Darwin's theory of evolution, gradually forming the modern system of evolutionary theory. In 1865 the Austrian botanist G.J. Mendel drew the correct conclusion about the inheritance of particles from a hybridization experiment with peas. He proved that genetic material does not fuse and can segregate and recombine in the process of reproductive transmission.

Genetics was established at the beginning of the 20th century, and T.H. Morgan and others went on to establish the doctrine of chromosome inheritance, which comprehensively revealed the basic laws of heredity. However, the use of the doctrine of genetics in the theory of evolution, will lead to racial, descent determinism, so most geneticists at that time, are opposed to the Darwinian doctrine of natural selection containing evolutionary significance (Morgan opposed is Darwin's doctrine of sexual selectionSexual selection). Indeed, Mendel's theory was a great challenge to Darwinian evolution. In the 1920s and 1930s first by R.A. Fisher, S. Wright and J.B.S. Haldane and others combined biostatistics with Mendel's theory of granular inheritance, reinterpretation of Darwin's doctrine of natural selection, the formation of population genetics.

Later C.C. Chetverikov, T. Dobrzynski, J. Huxley, E. Mayer, F.J. Ayala, G.L. Stebbins, G.G. Simpson, and J.W. Valentine developed Darwin's doctrine on the basis of the doctrine of chromosome heredity, population genetics, the concept of species, and the knowledge of many disciplines of palaeontology and molecular biology, and established a modern comprehensive theory of evolution.

The modern comprehensive theory of evolution completely denies the inheritance of acquired traits, emphasizes the gradual nature of evolution, considers evolution to be a group rather than an individual phenomenon, and re-affirms the overriding importance of natural selection, inheriting and developing the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Modern evolutionary theory holds that evolution is realized in populations of organisms, and that mutation, selection, and isolation are the three basic links in the process of biological evolution and species formation.

According to new observations, genetic variation originates from DNA damage, and DNA damage repair has a special DNA polymerase synthesized directly across the DNA damage is known as cross-damage synthesis polymerase, if the DNA genetic information in the repair of the variation, it is inevitably related to the genetic information of this enzyme protein.

Heredity and mutation is the opposite of the spear and shield, heredity exists in the DNA replication, belonging to the genetic replication of the central rule of thumb can not cross the boundary to determine the mutation aspects such as DNA damage in the protein information retrograde transfer of the problem of the "modern theory of comprehensive evolution" on the acquisition of trait inheritance of "complete denial" is not valid. The "modern comprehensive theory of evolution" on the inheritance of acquired traits is not valid. Aspects such as gradual and leap changes in evolutionary rates related to environmental adaptations, and the population nature of evolution, are more in line with the Lamarckian view of evolution in which acquired traits are heritable, than with the geological history of biology.

Recently, some scholars have synthesized various modern evolutionary theories and put forward the "four causes" of evolution, which holds that genes are the hereditary material, the genome stores the principles (forms) of life formation, and that the individual, driven by a combination of primary (solar energy) and secondary (genetic, physiological, and ecological) causes, is driven by a combination of primary and secondary causes. Through survival (a secondary purposefulness), they drive the prolongation and differentiation of races. Evolution is a movement of life in the form of innumerable individual lives, which is also a form of material movement, although more complex than the physical movement of objects. The entity-individual of life-existence is a unity of mass, form, motive and purpose, and is itself a composite of the movements of many levels of life, and a composite of many types of movements, and these further form the life-movement-evolution or evolution of the race.