This link has been bookmarked by 25 people . It was first bookmarked on 16 Jun 2008, by Colton Telford.
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06 Feb 17
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Excess population growth drives the competitive struggle. Because less successful competitors produce fewer surviving offspring, the useless or negative variations tend to disappear, whereas the useful variations tend to be perpetuated and gradually magnified throughout a population.
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03 Feb 17
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"just"
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knowledgeable experts accept it as fact
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not a dreamy and unreliable speculation
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taking it as their best available view of reality, at least until some severely conflicting data or some better explanation might come along.
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Evolutionary theory, though, is a bit different.
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nearly half the American populace prefers to believe that Charles Darwin was wrong where it mattered most.
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10 Oct 16
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not a dreamy and unreliable speculation
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despite the vast body of supporting evidence. As applied to our own species,
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that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis
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Evolution, by their lights, played no role in shaping us.
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believed that humans evolved from other life-forms without any involvement of a god.
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nearly half the American populace prefers to believe that Charles Darwin was wrong where it mattered most.
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Scriptural literalism
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Honest confusion and ignorance
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cultural osmosis, newspaper and magazine references, half-baked nature documentaries on the tube, and hearsay.
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Genetic changes sometimes accumulate within an isolated segment of a species, but not throughout the whole, as that isolated population adapts to its local condition
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species.
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And she prayed for his soul.
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Biogeography is the study of the geographical distribution of living creatures—that is, which species inhabit which parts of the planet and why.
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categories.
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ancestors.
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Because, Darwin wrote, "the embryo is the animal in its less modified state" and that state "reveals the structure of its progenitor."
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Living creatures can be easily sorted into a hierarchy of categories—not just species but genera, families, orders, whole kingdoms—based on which anatomical characters they share and which they don't.
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Vestigial
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biogeography, paleontology, embryology, morphology
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population genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and, most recently, the whiz-bang field of machine-driven genetic sequencing known as genomics
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right
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the correctness of his most famous good idea stood independent of that particular bad idea
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?
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23 May 16
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21 Feb 16
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If you are skeptical by nature, unfamiliar with the terminology of science, and unaware of the overwhelming evidence, you might even be tempted to say that it's "just" a theory
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According to a Gallup poll drawn from more than a thousand telephone interviews conducted in February 2001, no less than 45 percent of responding U.S. adults agreed that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." Evolution, by their lights, played no role in shaping us.
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The evidence, as he presented it, mostly fell within four categories: biogeography, paleontology, embryology, and morphology.
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Today the same four branches of biological science from which Darwin drew—biogeography, paleontology, embryology, morphology—embrace an ever growing body of supporting data. In addition to those categories we now have others: population genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and, most recently, the whiz-bang field of machine-driven genetic sequencing known as genomics. These new forms of knowledge overlap one another seamlessly and intersect with the older forms, strengthening the whole edifice, contributing further to the certainty that Darwin was right.
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Some viruses evolve quickly, some slowly. Among the fastest is HIV, because its method of replicating itself involves a high rate of mutation, and those mutations allow the virus to assume new forms. After just a few years of infection and drug treatment, each HIV patient carries a unique version of the virus. Isolation within one infected person, plus differing conditions and the struggle to survive, forces each version of HIV to evolve independently. It's nothing but a speeded up and microscopic case of what Darwin saw in the Galápagos—except that each human body is an island, and the newly evolved forms aren't so charming as finches or mockingbirds.
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16 May 13
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06 Apr 13
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The most startling thing about these poll numbers is not that so many Americans reject evolution, but that the statistical breakdown hasn't changed much in two decades.
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Gallup interviewers posed exactly the same choices in 1982, 1993, 1997, and 1999.
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The gist of the concept is that small, random, heritable differences among individuals result in different chances of survival and reproduction—success for some, death without offspring for others
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significant changes in shape, size, strength, armament, color, biochemistry, and behavior among the descendants. Excess population growth drives the competitive struggle. Because less successful competitors produce fewer surviving offspring, the useless or negative variations tend to disappear, whereas the useful variations tend to be perpetuated and gradually magnified
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So much for one part of the evolutionary process, known as anagenesis, during which a single species is transformed. But there's also a second part, known as speciation.
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20 May 12
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11 Apr 11
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22 Jan 10
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05 Mar 09
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16 Oct 08
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31 Jul 08
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16 Jun 08
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12 Dec 07
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