University of zakho

Faculty of science
Dept. of biology

ZOOLOGY, REPORT ABOUT

Revisions of Darwin’s Theory

STUDENT NAME: Bilind A. Younis

2022 AD ‫ هـ‬1443 ‫ ک‬2721

Introduction 1

What Is Natural Selection? 2

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 Introduction
Charles Darwin, in full Charles Robert Darwin, (born February 12, 1809, Shrewsbury, Shropshire,
England—died April 19, 1882, Downe, Kent), English naturalist whose scientific theory of
evolution by natural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. An affable
country gentleman, Darwin at first shocked religious Victorian society by suggesting that animals
and humans shared a common ancestry. However, his nonreligious biology appealed to the rising
class of professional scientists, and by the time of his death evolutionary imagery had spread
through all of science, literature, and politics. Darwin, himself an agnostic, was accorded the
ultimate British accolade of burial in Westminster Abbey, London

Darwin formulated his bold theory in private in 1837–39, after returning from a voyage around the
world aboard HMS Beagle, but it was not until two decades later that he finally gave it full public
expression in On the Origin of Species (1859), a book that has deeply influenced modern Western
society and thought.

Courtesy of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, New
York

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 What Is Natural Selection?
Darwin chose the term "natural selection" to be in contrast with "artificial selection," in which
animal breeders select for particular traits that they deem desirable. In natural selection, it's the
natural environment, rather than a human being, that does the selecting.

Put simply, the theory of evolution by means of natural selection can be described as "descent with
modification," said Briana Pobiner, an anthropologist and educator at the Smithsonian National
Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., who specializes in the study of human origins.
The theory is sometimes described as "survival of the fittest," but that characterization can be
misleading, Pobiner said. Here, "fitness" refers not to an organism's strength or athleticism but
rather its ability to survive and reproduce.

Natural selection can alter a species in small ways, causing a population to change color or size
over the course of several generations, according to The Natural History Museum. When this
process happens over a relatively short period of time and in a species or small group of organisms,
scientists call it "microevolution."

Archaeopteryx, shown here in this illustration, is considered the first bird-like dinosaur on record, dating to about 150
million years ago during the Jurassic period. (Image credit: Leonello Calvetti/Getty Images)

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 Whale evolution: an example of converging lines of evidence
One of the things I personally find quite enjoyable about evolutionary theory is the counter-
intuitiveness of some of the predictions it makes. One example that is a personal favorite, and one
I often use to illustrate how evolution makes sense of converging lines of evidence, is cetacean
(whale) evolution. Let’s set up the “problem” that evolutionary biology forces upon us:

 Modern cetaceans are mammals – they nourish their young in utero through a placenta, give
birth to live young, and feed newborns with milk – all features of standard mammalian
biology.
 Mammals are tetrapods – organisms with four limbs. Mammalian life shows up in the fossil
record as an innovation within tetrapods, so mammals are “nested within the set” of
tetrapod forms. Not all tetrapods are mammals (amphibians, for example) but all mammals
are tetrapods.
 Tetrapods are by and large terrestrial creatures. Having four limbs for locomotion is a
distinctly land-based adaptation.

The “problem”, of course, is that modern whales are emphatically not terrestrial, nor do they have
four limbs–they have two front flippers and a tail, with no hind limbs in sight. Yet they are
mammals, which forces evolution’s hand as it were. Evolution thus is dragged, under protest, to the
prediction that modern whales, as mammals, are descended, with modification, from ancestral
terrestrial, tetrapod ancestors. Instantly this prediction raises a host of uncomfortable questions:
where did their hind limbs go? How did they acquire a blowhole on the top of their heads when
other mammals have two nostrils on the front of their faces? How did they transition to giving birth
in the water? What happened to the teeth of the baleen whales? What happened to the hair
characteristic of mammals? And so on. In some ways, evolutionary thinking about whales creates
more difficulties than it appears to solve.

And yet, these difficulties are the stuff of science. If indeed our “educated guess” of terrestrial,
tetrapod ancestry for whales is correct, the evidence will show that these transitions, challenging
though they may seem, did indeed occur on the road to becoming “truly cetacean.”

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 Other Theories Of Evolution
Darwin wasn't the first or only scientist to develop a theory of evolution. Around the same time as
Darwin, British biologist Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the theory of
evolution by natural selection, according to the Natural History Museum(opens in new tab).
However this had little impact.

"The concept of evolution as a historical event was a hot topic among biologists and geologists
prior to Darwin’s book because there was so much evidence accumulating, but I suspect biological
evolution hadn’t really impinged on people outside of the academic bunker," Dr. P John D.
Lambshead, a retired science research leader in marine biodiversity, ecology, and evolution at The
Natural History Museum, London, told All About History Magazine(opens in new tab). "As long
as science knew of no mechanism to explain how evolution happened it could be safely dismissed
as a crank idea."

Meanwhile, French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that an organism could pass on traits
to its offspring, though he was wrong about some of the details, according to the University of
California’s Museum of Paleontology(opens in new tab).

Like Darwin, Lamarck believed that organisms adapted to their environments and passed on those
adaptations. He thought organisms did this by changing their behavior and, therefore, their bodies
— like an athlete working out and getting buff — and that those changes were passed on to
offspring.

Maasai giraffe browses on leaves of a tall tree in the Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya.
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For example, Lamarck thought that giraffes originally had shorter necks but that, as trees around
them grew taller, they stretched their necks to reach the tasty leaves and their offspring gradually
evolved longer and longer necks. Lamarck also believed that life was somehow driven to evolve
through the generations from simple to more complex forms, according to Understanding
Evolution(opens in new tab), an educational resource from the University of California Museum
of Paleontology(opens in new tab).

Though Darwin wasn't sure of the mechanism by which traits were passed on, he did not believe
that evolution necessarily moved toward greater complexity, according to Understanding Evolution
— rather, he believed that complexity arose through natural selection.

A Darwinian view of giraffe evolution, according to Quanta Magazine(opens in new tab), would
be that giraffes had natural variation in their neck lengths, and that those with longer necks were
better able to survive and reproduce in environments full of tall trees, so that subsequent
generations had more and more long-necked giraffes.

The main difference between the Lamarckian and Darwinian ideas of giraffe evolution is that
there's nothing in the Darwinian explanation about giraffes stretching their necks and passing on
an acquired characteristic.

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 Reference
1. https://www.britannica.com/list/what-darwin-got-right-and-wrong-about-
evolution

2. https://www.livescience.com/474-controversy-evolution-works.html

3. https://biologos.org/articles/whale-evolution-theory-prediction-and-converging-
lines-of-evidence