Evidence for evolution

Theories aren’t capitalized or highlighted with italics, but you do capitalize someone’s name when it’s part of a theory: Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

School subjects like math, language arts, science, social studies, history, and art are NOT capitalized in formal writing. School subjects that are languages, like English, French, Chinese, and Spanish, ARE capitalized. College courses, like History 101 and Interpersonal Communications, are capitalized.

Contrary Rule #2: “Do not capitalize the names of laws, theories, models, statistical procedures, or hypotheses” (APA, 2010, p. 102) since they can be understood to serve more as common nouns as opposed to proper nouns.

No. You only capitalize proper nouns. Evolution is just a word to describe what had long been observed occur in nature. Creationism is just a word used to describe what some people want to be what happens in nature.

• Anatomy. Species may share similar physical features because the feature was present in a common ancestor (homologous structures).
• Molecular biology. DNA and the genetic code reflect the shared ancestry of life.
• Biogeography.
• Fossils.
• Direct observation.

descent with modification

Darwin proposed that species can change over time, that new species come from pre-existing species, and that all species share a common ancestor. Darwin referred to this process, in which groups of organisms change in their heritable traits over generations, as “descent with modification.” Today, we call it evolution.

The five theories were: (1) evolution as such, (2) common descent, (3) gradualism, (4) multiplication of species, and (5) natural selection. Someone might claim that indeed these five theories are a logically inseparable package and that Darwin was quite correct in treating them as such.

Evolution, in this context, is both a fact and a theory. It is an incontrovertible fact that organisms have changed, or evolved, during the history of life on Earth. And biologists have identified and investigated mechanisms that can explain the major patterns of change.”

Gravity is most accurately described by the general theory of relativity (proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915), which describes gravity not as a force, but as a consequence of masses moving along geodesic lines in a curved spacetime caused by the uneven distribution of mass.

The basic rationale behind the conclusion that human evolution has stopped is that once the human lineage had achieved a sufficiently large brain and had developed a sufficiently sophisticated culture (sometime around 40,000–50,000 years ago according to Gould, but more commonly placed at 10,000 years ago with the …

Isn’t evolution just a theory that remains unproven? A scientific theory stands until proven wrong — it is never proven correct. The Darwinian theory of evolution has withstood the test of time and thousands of scientific experiments; nothing has disproved it since Darwin first proposed it more than 150 years ago.

Perhaps the most persuasive fossil evidence for evolution is the consistency of the sequence of fossils from early to recent. Nowhere on Earth do we find, for example, mammals in Devonian (the age of fishes) strata, or human fossils coexisting with dinosaur remains.

Organisms that seem fairly similar on the basis of comparative anatomy, show more genes in common than organisms that aren’t much alike. For example, 96% of the genes in humans and chimpanzees are identical. That two species and their common ancestor have similar DNA is strong evidence supporting evolution.

In addition to the theory of evolution, meaning the idea of descent with modification, one may also speak of the fact of evolution. The NAS defines a fact as “an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as ‘true.

After the Scopes trial, the laws banning the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi remained in effect for more than 40 years.

Modern humans originated in Africa within the past 200,000 years and evolved from their most likely recent common ancestor, Homo erectus, which means ‘upright man’ in Latin. Homo erectus is an extinct species of human that lived between 1.9 million and 135,000 years ago.

Charles Darwin