Elev:Căpruciu Andreea

Clasa:a XII-a F intensive engleză

Profesor coordonator:Martin Adriana

-ANUL SCOLAR 2010/2011-

 Content

Chapter I
Charles Robert Darwin……………………3-4

Chapter II
The origin of species

1.The history of evolution.............................5-6

2.Evolution………………………………….7

3.Heredity…………………………………8-9

Chapter III
The natural selection theory……………..10

1.Types of selection……………………….11-12

2.Common descent……………………….13

3.Evolution of life…………………………14

Chapter IV
The importance of the evolution of human being…………15-17

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 Chapter I

Charles Robert Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist. He
established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and
proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that
he called natural selection.

He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin
of Species. The scientific community and much of the general public came to accept evolution as
a fact in his lifetime. However, it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary
synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed that natural selection
was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the
unifying theory of life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.

Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of
Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. Studies at the University of
Cambridge encouraged his passion for natural science. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle
established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles
Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a
popular author.

Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage,
Darwin investigated the transmutation of species and conceived his theory of natural selection in
1838. Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive
research and his geological work had priority. He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred
Russel Wallace sent him an essay which described the same idea, prompting immediate joint
publication of both of their theories. Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with
modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature. In 1871, he
examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man,and Selection in
Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His
research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined
earthworms and their effect on soil.

In recognition of Darwin's pre-eminence as a scientist, he was one of only five nineteenth-

century non-royal personages from the United Kingdom to be honored by a state funeral ,and
was buried in Westminster Abbey, close to John Herschel and Isaac Newton.

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4
Books list of Charles Robert Darwin:

1.The voyage of the Beagle(1839)

2.Origin of Species(1859)

3.The descent of Man,and Selection in Relation to Sex(1871)

4.The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals(1872)

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 Chapter II.The Origin of species

1.The history of evolution

The roots of naturalistic thinking in biology can be dated to at least the 6th century BCE, with
the Greek philosopher Anaximander.

Early Christian Church Fathers and Medieval European scholars treated the Genesis creation
narrative as allegory and believed that natural organisms were unstable and capricious, but the
Protestant Reformation inspired Biblical literalism and a natural theology in which the concept
of species was essentialist, static and fixed. All entities within a species were seen as sharing a
common essence.

As emerging science explored mechanical philosophy in the 18th century, proto-evolutionary

ideas were set out by a few natural philosophers such as Pierre Maupertuis in 1745 and Erasmus
Darwin in 1796.

The word evolution was first used in relation to development of species in 1762, when Charles
Bonnet used it for his concept of "pre-formation", in which females carried a miniature form of
all future generations. The term gradually gained a more general meaning of growth or
progressive development.The first published modern use of the word has been attributed to the
Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal in 1826, edited by Robert Jameson but arguably authored
by Robert Edmond Grant.

. Beginning with Darwin, "species" were conceived in statistical terms; actual individuals were
expected to be different, with most diverging from the average form, and species were viewed as
variable and intergrading units.

Around 1854 Charles Darwin began writing out what became On the Origin of Species.

Darwin formulated his idea of natural selection in 1838 and was still developing his theory in
1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a similar theory, and both were presented to the

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Linnean Society of London in separate papers.At the end of 1859, Darwin's publication of On
the Origin of Species explained natural selection in detail and presented evidence leading to
increasingly wide acceptance of the occurrence of evolution. Thomas Henry Huxley applied
Darwin’s ideas to humans, using paleontology and comparative anatomy to provide strong
evidence that humans and apes shared a common ancestry. This caused an uproar around the
world since it implied that the creation myth in the Christian Bible was false, and humans did not
have a special place in the universe.

Debate about the mechanisms of evolution continued, and Darwin could not explain the
source of the heritable variations which would be acted on by natural selection. In 1865
Gregor Mendel found that traits were inherited in a predictable manner. When Mendel's work
was rediscovered in the 1900s, disagreements over the rate of evolution predicted by early
geneticists and biometricians led to a rift between the Mendelian and Darwinian models of
evolution.At the beginning of the 20th century, Thomas Hunt Morgan was able to demonstrate
that genes are carried on chromosomes and are the mechanical basis of heredity.

These discoveries formed the basis of the modern science of genetics. The end result was a
combination of evolution by natural selection and Mendelian inheritance, the modern
evolutionary synthesis.In the 1940s, the identification of DNA as the genetic material by Oswald
Avery and colleagues and the subsequent publication of the structure of DNA by James Watson
and Francis Crick in 1953, demonstrated the physical basis for inheritance.

Since then, genetics and molecular biology have become core parts of evolutionary biology and
have revolutionised the field of phylogenetics.Currently the study of evolutionary biology
involves scientists from fields as diverse as biochemistry, ecology, genetics and physiology, and
evolutionary concepts are used in even more distant disciplines such as psychology, medicine,
philosophy and computer science.In the 1960s, scientists such as W. D. Hamilton and George C.
Williams pioneered a gene-centered view of evolution, with concepts such as kin selection.

In the 21st century, current research in evolutionary biology deals with several areas where the
modern evolutionary synthesis may need modification or extension, such as assessing the
relative importance of various ideas on the unit of selection and evolvability and how to fully
incorporate the findings of evolutionary developmental biology.

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 2.Evolution

Evolution (also known as biological or organic evolution) is the change over time in the
proportion of individual organisms differing in one or more inherited traits.Inherited traits are
particular distinguishing characteristics, including anatomical, biochemical or behavioural
characteristics, that result from gene–environment interactions. Evolution may occur when there
is variation of inherited traits within a population. The major sources of such variation are
mutation, genetic recombination and gene flow.This process has produced all the diversity of
living organisms. Charles Darwin characterized the result as endless forms most beautiful and
most wonderful.

Two processes are generally distinguished as common causes of evolution. One is natural
selection, a process in which there is differential survival and/or reproduction of organisms that
differ in one or more inherited traits.Another cause is genetic drift, a process in which there are
random changes to the proportions of two or more inherited traits within a population.

In speciation, a single ancestral species splits into two or more different species. Speciation is
visible in anatomical, genetic and other similarities between groups of organisms, geographical
distribution of related species, the fossil record and the recorded genetic changes in living
organisms over many generations. Speciation stretches back over 3.5 billion years during which
life has existed on earth.It is thought to occur in multiple ways such as slowly, steadily and
gradually over time or rapidly from one long static state to another.

The scientific study of evolution began in the mid-nineteenth century, when research into the
fossil record and the diversity of living organisms convinced most scientists that species
evolve.The mechanism driving these changes remained unclear until the theory of natural
selection was independently proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace in 1858. In the
early 20th century, Darwinian theories of evolution were combined with genetics,
palaeontology, and systematics, which culminated into a union of ideas known as the modern
evolutionary synthesis.The synthesis became a major principle of biology as it provided a
coherent and unifying explanation for the history and diversity of life on Earth.

Evolution is currently applied and studied in various areas within biology such as conservation
biology, developmental biology, ecology, physiology, paleontology and medicine. Moreover, it
has also made an impact on traditionally non-biological disciplines such as agriculture,
anthropology, philosophy and psychology.

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 3.Heredity

Evolution in organisms occurs through changes in heritable traits – particular characteristics of

an organism. In humans, for example, eye colour is an inherited characteristic and an individual
might inherit the "brown-eye trait" from one of their parents.Inherited traits are controlled by
genes and the complete set of genes within an organism's genome is called its genotype. The
complete set of observable traits that make up the structure and behaviour of an organism is
called its phenotype. These traits come from the interaction of its genotype with the
environment.As a result, many aspects of an organism's phenotype are not inherited. For
example, suntanned skin comes from the interaction between a person's genotype and sunlight;
thus, suntans are not passed on to people's children. However, some people tan more easily than
others, due to differences in their genotype; a striking example are people with the inherited trait
of albinism, who do not tan at all and are very sensitive to sunburn. Heritable traits are known to
be passed from one generation to the next via DNA, a molecule that encodes genetic
information.

Developmental biologists suggest that complex interactions in genetic networks and

communication among cells can lead to heritable variations that may underlay some of the
mechanics in developmental plasticity and canalization. Recent findings have confirmed
important examples of heritable changes that cannot be explained by direct agency of the DNA
molecule.

Heritability may also occur at even larger scales. For example, ecological inheritance through the
process of niche construction is defined by the regular and repeated activities of organisms in
their environment. This generates a legacy of effect that modifies and feeds back into the
selection regime of subsequent generations. Descendants inherit genes plus environmental
characteristics generated by the ecological actions of ancestors. Other examples of heritability in
evolution that are not under the direct control of genes include the inheritance of cultural traits,
group heritability, and symbiogenesis. These examples of heritability that operate above the gene
are covered broadly under the title of multilevel or hierarchical selection, which has been a
subject of intense debate in the history of evolutionary science.

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DNA structure. Bases are in the centre, surrounded by phosphate–sugar chains in a double helix.

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 Chapter III.The natural selection theory

Natural selection is the process by which genetic mutations that enhance reproduction become,
and remain, more common in successive generations of a population. It has often been called a
"self-evident" mechanism because it necessarily follows from three simple facts:

 Heritable variation exists within populations of organisms.

 Organisms produce more offspring than can survive.
 These offspring vary in their ability to survive and reproduce.

These conditions produce competition between organisms for survival and reproduction.
Consequently, organisms with traits that give them an advantage over their competitors pass
these advantageous traits on, while traits that do not confer an advantage are not passed on to the
next generation.

The central concept of natural selection is the evolutionary fitness of an organism. Fitness is
measured by an organism's ability to survive and reproduce, which determines the size of its
genetic contribution to the next generation. However, fitness is not the same as the total number
of offspring: instead fitness is indicated by the proportion of subsequent generations that carry an
organism's genes. For example, if an organism could survive well and reproduce rapidly, but its
offspring were all too small and weak to survive, this organism would make little genetic
contribution to future generations and would thus have low fitness.

Natural selection of a population for dark colouration.

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 1.Types of selection

Natural selection within a population for a trait that can vary across a range of values, such as
height, can be categorised into three different types.

The first is directional selection, which is a shift in the average value of a trait over time — for
example, organisms slowly getting taller. Secondly, disruptive selection is selection for extreme
trait values and often results in two different values becoming most common, with selection
against the average value.

This would be when either short or tall organisms had an advantage, but not those of medium
height. Finally, in stabilizing selection there is selection against extreme trait values on both
ends, which causes a decrease in variance around the average value and less diversity. This
would, for example, cause organisms to slowly become all the same height.

A special case of natural selection is sexual selection, which is selection for any trait that
increases mating success by increasing the attractiveness of an organism to potential mates.
Traits that evolved through sexual selection are particularly prominent in males of some animal
species, despite traits such as cumbersome antlers, mating calls or bright colours that attract
predators, decreasing the survival of individual males. This survival disadvantage is balanced by
higher reproductive success in males that show these hard to fake, sexually selected traits.

Natural selection most generally makes nature the measure against which individuals, and
individual traits, are more or less likely to survive. "Nature" in this sense refers to an ecosystem,
that is, a system in which organisms interact with every other element, physical as well as
biological, in their local environment.

Each population within an ecosystem occupies a distinct niche, or position, with distinct
relationships to other parts of the system.

These relationships involve the life history of the organism, its position in the food chain, and its
geographic range. This broad understanding of nature enables scientists to delineate specific
forces which, together, comprise natural selection.

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A chart showing three types of selection.

1.Disruptive selection

2.Stabilizing selection

3.Directional selection

An active area of research is the unit of selection, with natural selection being proposed to work
at the level of genes, cells, individual organisms, groups of organisms and species. None of these
are mutually exclusive and selection can act on multiple levels simultaneously. An example of
selection occurring below the level of the individual organism are genes called transposons,
which can replicate and spread throughout a genome. Selection at a level above the individual,
such as group selection, may allow the evolution of co-operation, as discussed below.

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 2.Common descent

The hominoids are descendants of a common ancestor.

All organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool.Current
species are a stage in the process of evolution, with their diversity the product of a long series of
speciation and extinction events. The common descent of organisms was first deduced from four
simple facts about organisms: First, they have geographic distributions that cannot be explained
by local adaptation. Second, the diversity of life is not a set of completely unique organisms, but
organisms that share morphological similarities. Third, vestigial traits with no clear purpose
resemble functional ancestral traits, and finally, that organisms can be classified using these
similarities into a hierarchy of nested groups – similar to a family tree. However, modern
research has suggested that, due to horizontal gene transfer, this "tree of life" may be more
complicated than a simple branching tree since some genes have spread independently between
distantly related species.

Past species have also left records of their evolutionary history. Fossils, along with the
comparative anatomy of present-day organisms, constitute the morphological, or anatomical,
record. By comparing the anatomies of both modern and extinct species, paleontologists can
infer the lineages of those species. However, this approach is most successful for organisms that
had hard body parts, such as shells, bones or teeth. Further, as prokaryotes such as bacteria and
archaea share a limited set of common morphologies, their fossils do not provide information on
their ancestry.

More recently, evidence for common descent has come from the study of biochemical
similarities between organisms. For example, all living cells use the same basic set of nucleotides
and amino acids. The development of molecular genetics has revealed the record of evolution
left in organisms' genomes: dating when species diverged through the molecular clock produced
by mutations. For example, these DNA sequence comparisons have revealed that humans and

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chimpanzees share 96% of their genomes and analyzing the few areas where they differ helps
shed light on when the common ancestor of these species existed.

3.Evolution of life

Evolutionary
tree showing the divergence of modern species from their common ancestor in the centre. The three
domains are coloured, with bacteria blue, archaea green, and eukaryotes red.

The history of life was that of the unicellular eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and archaea until about 610
million years ago when multicellular organisms began to appear in the oceans in the Ediacaran period.
The evolution of multicellularity occurred in multiple independent events, in organisms as diverse as
sponges, brown algae, cyanobacteria, slime moulds and myxobacteria. Soon after the emergence of
these first multicellular organisms, a remarkable amount of biological diversity appeared over
approximately 10 million years, in an event called the Cambrian explosion. Here, the majority of types of
modern animals appeared in the fossil record, as well as unique lineages that subsequently became
extinct. Various triggers for the Cambrian explosion have been proposed, including the accumulation of
oxygen in the atmosphere from photosynthesis. About 500 million years ago, plants and fungi colonised
the land, and were soon followed by arthropods and other animals. Insects were particularly successful
and even today make up the majority of animal species. Amphibians first appeared around 300 million
years ago, followed by early amniotes, then mammals around 200 million years ago and birds around
100 million years ago (both from "reptile"-like lineages). However, despite the evolution of these large
animals, smaller organisms similar to the types that evolved early in this process continue to be highly
successful and dominate the Earth, with the majority of both biomass and species being prokaryotes.

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 Chapter IV. The importance of the evolution
of human being
1. Which are gains that we evolved from bacteria to humans?
Man is distinguished by a series of special faculties, not found in any other
living thing on Earth:

     * Speech
     * Reading
     * Writing
     * Knowledge, Research
     * Self-consciousness
     * artistic occupations
     * occupations related to ethical, moral, dignity, courage, future planning,
preservation of health, etc..

2. How man lived in the beginning and how it evolved over time?
In prehistoric times were first forms of social organization. At first, people
lived like animals, in groups based on ties of parents and offspring which operated
on the basis of basic needs: food, water, protection from danger.
Approaching complex cases between members of the same group and between
different groups, and occurred after people have perfected the tools, organized
themselves into groups. Therefore, there family, gens, tribe, tribal union.
At first, in the absence of criteria, ownership of the property belonged equally to
all members. However, differences are often made about the conflict, until the
establishment of the first rules to be observed in each group. Among the joint
activities include hunting, gathering, and those on the spiritual life.
Later, there was private ownership of tools, weapons.
Relations between different groups were characterized by: economic and cultural
exchanges through wars, organized to seize assets of other communities.

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3. How did faith appear over time?

Many historians place the emergence of religion in the Neolithic era. The first
consists of religious belief, worship Mother Goddess, the Father-Sky, and Sun and
Moon as deities. Shrines appear to develop in such places of the temple, which
corresponds to a multitude of priests and priestesses and people with other
priestly functions. Neolithic period is typical worship anthropomorphic deities.
The oldest religious writings in existence today are the texts of the Pyramids
made by ancient Egyptians and having a length of about 4500 years.

Ankor Wat Temple

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There are two different theories of appearance of belief:

The first theory of human emergence, talking about the emergence of human
consciousness, and not life in general, and is the oldest of creationist theories,
which of course God created all life forms, including human. as is described in the
Bible, as we all know, or ought to know, man was conceived of the Divine Power
of clay and breathed life. God created the Earth, moon, stars, sun, and that man
should not feel alone, because a man not to withdraw his inner self for all of
Adam's rib, he made woman. Well, this theory is as unsubstantiated as all other,
and you'll see, but meet the same number of premises which could quantitatively
to declare as true as any. Equally true could be fierce, bigots, of Christians to
assert that man can not exist outside of God as the most brilliant of doctors, bio-
chemists, it could be said that a man suffering from cancer due to staff pathogens
strong and not because of deadly sins perpetrated.

A second theory, chronologically speaking, is about Darwin's theory of natural

evolution, biological species through natural selection, of course. The big fish eats
little fish, you already know the food chain, but was accused Darwin of natural
selection (dpdv office) allowed him to assert that it was natural, normal and right
that the strong prosper at the expense of the weak, which is happens in everyday
life. Despite these setbacks came in the sphere of idealistic, philosophical
thinkers, ethics, all ages, a very important element was that all this theory to be a
pure fantasy, because the fundamental proof of this theory lay in the so-called
missing link. A group of researchers claim that they had discovered a fossil that
would bind us in ancestral primates, the fossil is called Ida. Test results and
findings reached by anthropologists have recently been circulated publicly. There
are many skeptics who dispute the study results and of course the very rocks.

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