Why the theory of evolution. Darwin's theory - evidence and refutation of the theory of human origin

The Bible explains why such teachings as the theory of evolution became popular. It says: “The time will come when sound doctrine will not be tolerated, but according to their desires they will recruit for themselves teachers who would flatter their ears. They will stop listening to the truth and turn away to fables” (2 Timothy 4:3, 4). Despite the fact that the theory of evolution is usually presented in scientific language, it is, in essence, a religious doctrine. It sets out a special philosophy of life and a certain attitude towards God. Its postulates appeal to human selfishness and the spirit of independence. Although there are many believers among the adherents of this theory, they believe in God in their own way - they do not perceive him as the Creator who created everything, and believe that he does not interfere in the affairs of people and will not judge them. Such views are flattering to the ear.

Adherents of the theory of evolution are not driven by knowledge of the facts, but by "their desires" - for example, the desire to achieve recognition in scientific circles, where this theory is taken as dogma. Professor of biochemistry Michael Behe, who has devoted most of his life to the study of complex intracellular mechanisms, says those who teach how the cell evolved have no basis for this. Could the process of evolution take place at the molecular level? Behe writes: “Molecular evolution is not based on scientific data. In the scientific literature - whether it be prestigious or specialized journals and books - there are no such articles that would describe how the molecular evolution of any complex biochemical system took place or could take place. [...] ...Darwin's theory of molecular evolution is just an unfounded conclusion.”

If evolutionists have no evidence, why are they so bold in promoting their ideas? Behe explains: “Many people, including well-known and respected scientists, simply do not want so that there is something else besides nature.”

The evolutionary doctrine appeals to many clerics who want to appear scientifically savvy. They can be compared with those people about whom the apostle Paul wrote to Christians in Rome. In his letter, he says: “Everything that can be known about God is revealed to them... His invisible qualities: eternal power and divine essence are clearly visible from the creation of the world, because they are recognized through what is created, so there is no excuses for them, because, knowing God, they did not glorify him as God and did not give thanks to him, but became foolish in their reasoning, and their ignorant heart was darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:19-22). How not to fall under the influence of such false teachers?

In 2009, Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University in New Jersey described how a new species of finches appeared on one of the Galapagos Islands; these same islands were visited by Darwin.

In 1981, a finch arrived on an island called Daphne Major. It was unusually large and sang a different song compared to the native birds. He managed to leave offspring that inherited his unusual features. After several generations, they were reproductively isolated: they were different from other birds and sang different songs, so they could only breed among themselves. This small group of birds formed a new species, "speciation" took place. The new species was quite a bit different from its predecessors: they had different beaks and they sang an unusual song. But sometimes there are more serious changes.

Richard Lensky of Michigan State University is running the longest-running evolutionary experiment in the world. Since 1998, Lensky has been monitoring 12 E. coli (Escherichia coli, E. coli) populations in his laboratory. The bacteria have been given their own containerized habitats and growth media, and Lenski's group regularly freezes small samples.

This E. coli is no longer what it was in 1988. “In all 12 populations, the bacteria evolved and grew faster than their ancestors,” says Lenski. They have adapted to a particular nutritional mixture of chemicals. “This is the most direct demonstration of Darwin's idea of ​​adaptation through natural selection. After 20 years of experimentation, typical linear bacterial growth is 80% faster.”

In 2008, Lenski's group reported that bacteria had taken a giant leap forward. The mixture they live in contains the chemical citrate, which E. coli cannot digest. But after 31,500 generations, one in twelve populations began to feed on citrate. It is as if people suddenly started successfully eating tree bark.

Citrate has always been there, Lensky says, “so all populations had the ability to develop the ability to use it. But only one out of 12 populations was able to learn this.”

At this point, Lenski's habit of regularly freezing bacterial samples proved to be decisive. He was able to go back to the older samples and trace the changes that led E. coli to start eating citrate. To do this, I had to look under the hood. He used a tool that did not exist in Darwin's time, but one that revolutionized the understanding of evolution: genetics.


All living creatures carry genes in the form of DNA.

Genes control how an organism grows and develops and are passed from parent to offspring. When a mother hen lays a lot of eggs and passes this trait on to her offspring, it happens through genes. Over the past century, scientists have cataloged the genes of a wide variety of species. It turned out that all living beings store information in DNA in the same way: everyone uses the same “genetic code”.

Moreover, organisms have many identical genes. The thousands of genes found in human DNA can also be found in the DNA of other creatures, including plants and even bacteria. These two facts mean that all modern life descended from one common ancestor, the "last universal ancestor", who lived billions of years ago.

By comparing how many genes organisms have in common, we can figure out how they are related. For example, humans share genes with monkeys more than with other animals, up to 96%. This suggests that they are our closest relatives.

“Try to explain in some other way that this connection was not formed through a chain of changes over time,” says Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. “We share a common ancestor with chimpanzees, and we and they diverged from that common ancestor.”

We can also use genetics to track the details of evolutionary change.

"You can compare different types of bacteria and find common genes," says Nancy Moran of the University of Texas at Austin. "Once you identify these genes, you can look at how they evolved in different populations."

When Lensky went back to the early samples of E. coli, he found that the citrate-eating bacteria received several changes in DNA, unlike other bacteria. These changes are called mutations.

Some of these happened long before the bacteria developed their new ability. "On their own, these mutations didn't enable the ability to grow in citrate, but set the stage for subsequent mutations that turned on that ability," says Lenski.

This complex chain of events helps explain why only one population developed this ability. It also illustrates an important point in evolution. A single evolutionary step may seem extremely unlikely, but if too many organisms are striving for it, one of them is sure to want and be able to carry it out.

Lenski's E. coli shows us that evolution can give organisms entirely new abilities. But evolution doesn't always make things better. Its consequences often seem to our eyes to be accidental.

Mutations that lead to changes in the body are very rarely good, Moran says. Most mutations have no effect, positive or negative, on how an organism functions. When bacteria find themselves in an isolated environment, they resort to unwanted genetic mutations that spread over each generation. Over time, this gradually kills the species.

"It's really a process of evolution," says Moran. “This is not just an adaptation and a road to the better, things can go oh so bad.”

Sometimes organisms lose their abilities. For example, animals that prefer dark caves often lose their eyes. This may seem strange. We are accustomed to consider evolution as a process of biological improvement of the species, the desire to escape from primitiveness. But that's not the case at all.


Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a scientist who promoted the idea of ​​the evolution of organisms even before Darwin, spoke about the desire for improvement. Lamarck's contribution proved to be very valuable. But, unlike Darwin, Lamarck believed that organisms are becoming more accustomed to their environment and the improvement of their properties is a deliberate reaction to these environments, as if they want to become better.

Lamarck's theory would say that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors wanted to reach high branches and then pass on these newfound long necks to their offspring.

“Darwin wrote about Lamarck privately and called his theory completely nonsensical and untestable,” says Jones. What exactly did they want to improve? How to check it?

Darwin had an alternative theory: natural selection. He offered a completely different explanation for the long necks of giraffes. Imagine the ancestor of the modern giraffe, some kind of deer or antelope. If there were many tall trees in the habitats of these animals, animals with a long neck would get more food and feel better than short-necked animals.

A few generations later, all animals would have had longer necks than their ancestors. Again, the animals with the longest necks would win, so over the years, giraffe necks would gradually lengthen as long-necked animals produced more offspring. The mutations that underlie all this happened by chance and would have produced short and long necks with equal probability. But the mutations of the short necks did not linger too long.

Animals like giraffes surprise us because they seem to have adapted perfectly. They live in places where the trees are tall, their leaves are high above the ground, so giraffes must have long necks to eat.

“Such a performance actually puts people in a stupor. Because it looks perfect, it feels like everything was carefully planned and thought out,” says Moran. But if you look closely, everything will turn out to be the result of a long chain of small changes. “You understand, damn it, nothing was planned, just one random event led to another random event.”

Now we have all the pieces of evidence, and if you put them together, they show that life has evolved.

The descent of modification, which was caused by random mutations in genes, eventually led to gradual changes and the formation of new species - much of this due to natural selection, which weeds out those organisms that are least suited to the environment.

Now let's try it all on ourselves.

Human evolution has always been a hard-to-digest concept, but looking at it now, it's impossible to turn a blind eye, Stringer says. Homo sapiens is believed to have evolved in Africa and then spread throughout the world.

Fossil records show a gradual change from ape-like animals that walked on all fours to bipedal creatures that gradually acquired large brains. These first humans left Africa and interbred with other hominids like the Neanderthals. As a result, people of European and Asian ancestry carry Neanderthal genes in their DNA, while people in Africa do not.

All this happened thousands of years ago, but the story is not over yet. We are still evolving.

For example, in the 1950s, British doctor Anthony Ellison studied a genetic disease - sickle cell anemia - common among some African populations. People with this disorder have deformed red blood cells that don't carry oxygen around the body as well as they could if they weren't sickle-shaped. Ellison found that eastern African populations were divided into groups of people living in lowland areas, more prone to disease, and people living in highlands, less prone.


It turned out that people who carry the sickle cell trait had an unexpected advantage. It protects them from malaria, which only threatens people living in the lowlands. Such people were better able to tolerate the sickle cell mutation, even if their children might be anemic. On the other hand, people living in the mountains were not at risk of malaria. They didn't need to wear the sickle cell trait, as it didn't provide any significant benefits on its own.

Of course, there are still many questions in evolution to which we do not yet know the answers.

Stringer asks a simpler one: what genetic change allowed humans to walk upright, and why was this mutation so successful? We don't know yet, but the fossil record may one day shed some light on this mystery.

As long as we know that evolution is a natural fact. It is the basis of life on Earth as we know it. So the next time you're in a garden or a farm, just walk around, look at the animals and the plants, think about how they got that way. Every organism you see, be it an insect or a giant elephant, is the last member of its ancient family. Their ancestors lined up in an unbroken chain for 3 billion years, passing the word of life until this elephant or cockroach appeared. However, so do we.

We know about Anaximander's scheme from the historian of the 1st century BC. e. Diodorus Siculus. In his presentation, when the young Earth was illuminated by the Sun, its surface first hardened, and then fermented, rotting appeared, covered with thin shells. All kinds of animal breeds were born in these shells. Man, on the other hand, seems to have arisen from a fish or an animal similar to a fish. Although original, Anaximander's reasoning is purely speculative and unsupported by observation. Another ancient thinker, Xenophanes, paid more attention to observations. So, he identified the fossils that he found in the mountains with the prints of ancient plants and animals: laurel, shells of mollusks, fish, seals. From this, he concluded that the land once sank into the sea, bringing death to land animals and people, and turned into mud, and when it rose, the imprints dried up. Heraclitus, despite the impregnation of his metaphysics with the idea of ​​constant development and eternal becoming, did not create any evolutionary concepts. Although some authors still refer to him as the first evolutionists.

The only author from whom the idea of ​​a gradual change of organisms can be found was Plato. In his dialogue "The State" he put forward the infamous proposal: to improve the breed of people by selecting the best representatives. Without a doubt, this proposal was based on the well-known fact of the selection of producers in animal husbandry. In the modern era, the unwarranted application of these ideas to human society has developed into the doctrine of eugenics, which underlies the racial politics of the Third Reich.

Medieval and Renaissance

With the rise in the level of scientific knowledge after the "ages of darkness" of the early Middle Ages, evolutionary ideas again begin to slip in the writings of scientists, theologians and philosophers. Albert the Great first noted the spontaneous variability of plants, leading to the emergence of new species. The examples once given by Theophrastus he characterized as transmutation one kind to another. The term itself was apparently taken by him from alchemy. In the 16th century, fossil organisms were rediscovered, but only by the end of the 17th century did the idea that this was not a “game of nature”, not stones in the form of bones or shells, but the remains of ancient animals and plants, finally captured the minds. In the work of the year "Noah's Ark, Its Shape and Capacity", Johann Buteo gave calculations that showed that the ark could not contain all kinds of known animals. In the year Bernard Palissy arranged an exhibition of fossils in Paris, where he first compared them with living ones. In the year he published in print the idea that since everything in nature is "in eternal transmutation", many fossil remains of fish and mollusks belong to extinct types.

Evolutionary ideas of modern times

As we can see, the matter did not go beyond the expression of disparate ideas about the variability of species. This same trend continued with the advent of the New Age. So Francis Bacon, the politician and philosopher, suggested that species could change, accumulating the "errors of nature". This thesis again, as in the case of Empedocles, echoes the principle of natural selection, but there is not yet a word about the general theory. Oddly enough, but the first book on evolution can be considered a treatise by Matthew Hale (Eng. Matthew Hale) "The Primitive Origination of Mankind Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature". This may seem strange just because Hale himself was not a naturalist and even a philosopher, he was a lawyer, theologian and financier, and wrote his treatise during a forced vacation on his estate. In it, he wrote that one should not assume that all species were created in their modern form, on the contrary, only archetypes were created, and all the diversity of life developed from them under the influence of numerous circumstances. Hale also anticipates many of the controversies about chance that have arisen since the establishment of Darwinism. In the same treatise, the term "evolution" in the biological sense is mentioned for the first time.

Ideas of limited evolutionism like those of Hale arose constantly, and can be found in the writings of John Ray, Robert Hooke, Gottfried Leibniz, and even in the later work of Carl Linnaeus. They are expressed more clearly by Georges Louis Buffon. Observing the precipitation from the water, he came to the conclusion that 6 thousand years, which were assigned to the history of the Earth by natural theology, are not enough for the formation of sedimentary rocks. The age of the Earth calculated by Buffon was 75 thousand years. Describing the species of animals and plants, Buffon noted that, along with useful features, they also have those to which it is impossible to attribute any utility. This again contradicted natural theology, which held that every hair on an animal's body was created for its benefit, or for man's benefit. Buffon came to the conclusion that this contradiction can be eliminated by accepting the creation of only a general plan, which varies in specific incarnations. Having applied Leibniz's "law of continuity" to taxonomy, he spoke out in a year against the existence of discrete species, considering species to be the fruit of the fantasy of taxonomists (this can be seen as the origins of his ongoing polemic with Linnaeus and the antipathy of these scientists to each other).

Lamarck's theory

The move to combine transformist and systematic approaches was made by the naturalist and philosopher Jean Baptiste Lamarck. As a proponent of species change and a deist, he recognized the Creator and believed that the Supreme Creator created only matter and nature; all other inanimate and living objects arose from matter under the influence of nature. Lamarck emphasized that "all living bodies come from one another, and not by successive development from previous embryos." Thus, he opposed the concept of preformism as autogenetic, and his follower Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844) defended the idea of ​​the unity of the body plan of animals of various types. Lamarck's evolutionary ideas are most fully set forth in the Philosophy of Zoology (1809), although Lamarck formulated many of his evolutionary theory in introductory lectures to the course of zoology as early as 1800-1802. Lamarck believed that the steps of evolution do not lie in a straight line, as follows from the "ladder of beings" of the Swiss natural philosopher C. Bonnet, but have many branches and deviations at the level of species and genera. This performance set the stage for future family trees. Lamarck proposed the very term "biology" in its modern sense. However, the zoological works of Lamarck, the creator of the first evolutionary doctrine, contained many factual inaccuracies and speculative constructions, which is especially evident when comparing his works with the works of his contemporary, rival and critic, the creator of comparative anatomy and paleontology, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). Lamarck believed that the driving factor of evolution could be the "exercise" or "non-exercise" of the organs, depending on the adequate direct influence of the environment. A certain naivety of Lamarck's and Saint-Hilaire's arguments contributed greatly to the anti-evolutionary reaction to the transformism of the early 19th century, and provoked criticism from the creationist Georges Cuvier and his school, absolutely reasoned from the factual side of the issue.

catastrophism and transformism

Cuvier's ideal was Linnaeus. Cuvier divided animals into four "branches", each of which is characterized by a common body plan. For these "branches", his follower A. Blainville proposed the concept of type, which fully corresponded to the "branches" of Cuvier. A phylum is not just the highest taxon in the animal kingdom. There are no and cannot be transitional forms between the four distinguished types of animals. All animals belonging to the same type are characterized by a common structural plan. This most important position of Cuvier is extremely significant even today. Although the number of types has significantly exceeded the figure 4, all biologists who speak about the type proceed from the fundamental idea that gives a lot of trouble to the propagandists of gradualism (gradualism) in evolution - the idea of ​​​​the isolation of the plans of the structure of each of the types. Cuvier fully accepted the Linnaean hierarchy of the system and built his system in the form of a branching tree. But it was not a genealogical tree, but a tree of similarity of organisms. As rightly noted by A.A. Borisyak, "having built a system on ... a comprehensive account of the similarities and differences of organisms, he thereby opened the door for the evolutionary doctrine against which he fought." Cuvier's system was apparently the first system of organic nature in which modern forms were considered side by side with fossils. Cuvier is rightfully considered a significant figure in the development of paleontology, biostratigraphy and historical geology as sciences. The theoretical basis for distinguishing the boundaries between the layers was Cuvier's idea of ​​catastrophic extinctions of faunas and floras at the boundaries of periods and epochs. He also developed the doctrine of correlations (italics by N.N. Vorontsova), thanks to which he restored the appearance of the skull as a whole, the skeleton as a whole, and, finally, gave a reconstruction of the external appearance of a fossil animal. His contribution to stratigraphy, together with Cuvier, was made by his French colleague paleontologist and geologist A. Brongniard (1770-1847), and, independently of them, by the English surveyor and mining engineer William Smith (1769-1839). The term of the doctrine of the form of organisms - morphology - was introduced into the biological science of Goethe, and the doctrine itself arose at the end of the 18th century. For the creationists of that time, the concept of the unity of the structural plan meant a search for the similarity, but not the relationship, of organisms. The task of comparative anatomy was seen as an attempt to understand according to what plan the Supreme Being created all the variety of animals that we observe on Earth. Evolutionary classics call this period of development of biology "idealistic morphology". This trend was also developed by an opponent of transformism, the English anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen (1804-1892). By the way, it was he who proposed to apply the now known analogy or homology to structures that perform similar functions, depending on whether the compared animals belong to the same structural plan, or to different ones (to the same type of animal or to different types).

Evolutionists - contemporaries of Darwin

The English arborist Patrick Matthew (1790-1874) in 1831 published a monograph "Ship timber and tree planting". The phenomenon of uneven growth of trees of the same age, the selective death of some and the survival of others have long been known to foresters. Matthew suggested that selection not only ensures the survival of the fittest trees, but can also lead to changes in species in the course of historical development. Thus, the struggle for existence and natural selection were known to him. At the same time, he believed that the acceleration of the evolutionary process depends on the will of the organism (Lamarckism). The principle of the struggle for existence coexisted with Matthew with the recognition of the existence of catastrophes: after revolutions, a few primitive forms survive; in the absence of competition after the revolution, the evolutionary process proceeds rapidly. Matthew's evolutionary ideas went unnoticed for three decades. But in 1868, after the publication of On the Origin of Species, he published his evolutionary pages. After that, Darwin got acquainted with the works of his predecessor and noted the merits of Matthew in a historical review of the 3rd edition of his work.

Charles Lyell (1797-1875) is a major figure of his time. He brought back to life the concept of actualism (“The Basic Principles of Geology”, 1830-1833), which comes from ancient authors, as well as from such significant personalities in human history as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Lomonosov (1711-1765), James Hutton (England, Hutton, 1726-1797) and, finally, Lamarck. Lyell's acceptance of the concept of knowing the past through the study of the present meant the creation of the first integral theory of the evolution of the face of the Earth. The English philosopher and historian of science William Whewell (1794-1866) in 1832 put forward the term uniformitarianism in relation to the assessment of Lyell's theory. Lyell spoke of the invariability of the action of geological factors in time. Uniformism was the complete antithesis of Cuvier's catastrophism. “Lyell's teaching now prevails just as much,” wrote the anthropologist and evolutionist I. Ranke, “as Cuvier's teaching once dominated. At the same time, it is often forgotten that the doctrine of catastrophes could hardly have given a satisfactory schematic explanation of geological facts for so long in the eyes of the best researchers and thinkers, if it had not been based on a certain amount of positive observations. Here, too, the truth lies between the extremes of theory. As modern biologists admit, “Cuvier's catastrophism was a necessary stage in the development of historical geology and paleontology. Without catastrophism, the development of biostratigraphy would hardly have gone so fast.”

The Scotsman Robert Chambers (1802-1871), a book publisher and popularizer of science, published in London Traces of the Natural History of Creation (1844), in which he anonymously propagated the ideas of Lamarck, talked about the duration of the evolutionary process and about evolutionary development from simply organized ancestors to more complex forms . The book was designed for a wide readership and in 10 years it went through 10 editions with a circulation of at least 15 thousand copies (which in itself is impressive for that time). Controversy erupted around the book by an anonymous author. Always very restrained and cautious, Darwin stood aloof from the discussion that unfolded in England, but carefully watched how criticism of particular inaccuracies turned into a criticism of the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200bvariability of species, so as not to repeat such mistakes. Chambers, after the publication of Darwin's book, immediately joined the ranks of supporters of the new doctrine.

In the 20th century, they remembered Edward Blyth (1810-1873), an English zoologist and explorer of the Australian fauna. In 1835 and 1837 he published two articles in the English Journal of Natural History in which he said that in conditions of fierce competition and a lack of resources, only the strongest had chances to leave offspring.

Thus, even before the publication of the famous work, the whole course of the development of natural science had already prepared the ground for the perception of the doctrine of the variability of species and selection.

Proceedings of Darwin

A new stage in the development of evolutionary theory came in 1859 as a result of the publication of Charles Darwin's seminal work The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favorable Races in the Struggle for Life. According to Darwin, the main driving force behind evolution is natural selection. Selection, acting on individuals, allows those organisms that are better adapted to life in a given environment to survive and leave offspring. The action of selection leads to the breakup of species into parts - daughter species, which, in turn, diverge over time to genera, families, and all larger taxa.

With his usual honesty, Darwin pointed out those who had directly pushed him to write and publish the doctrine of evolution (apparently, Darwin was not too interested in the history of science, since in the first edition of On the Origin of Species he did not mention his immediate predecessors: Wells, Matthew, Blite). Lyell and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) had a direct influence on Darwin in the process of creating the work, with his geometric progression of numbers from the demographic work An Essay on the Law of Population (1798). And, it can be said, Darwin was "forced" to publish his work by a young English zoologist and biogeographer Alfred Wallace (1823-1913), sending him a manuscript in which, independently of Darwin, he sets out the ideas of the theory of natural selection. At the same time, Wallace knew that Darwin was working on evolutionary doctrine, for the latter himself wrote to him about this in a letter dated May 1, 1857: “This summer it will be 20 years (!) Since I started my first notebook on the question of how and in what way species and varieties differ from each other. Now I am preparing my work for publication... but I do not intend to publish it earlier than in two years... Indeed, it is impossible (in the framework of a letter) to state my views on the causes and methods of changes in the state of nature; but step by step I came to a clear and distinct idea - true or false, this must be judged by others; because, alas! - the most unshakable confidence of the author of the theory that he is right is in no way a guarantee of its truth! Darwin's sanity can be seen here, as well as the gentlemanly attitude of the two scientists towards each other, which is clearly seen when analyzing the correspondence between them. Darwin, having received the article on June 18, 1858, wanted to submit it to the press, keeping silent about his work, and only at the insistence of his friends wrote a “brief extract” from his work and presented these two works to the judgment of the Linnean Society.

Darwin fully accepted the idea of ​​gradual development from Lyell and, one might say, was a uniformitarian. The question may arise: if everything was known before Darwin, then what is his merit, why did his work cause such a resonance? But Darwin did what his predecessors failed to do. First, he gave his work a very topical title that was "on everyone's lips." The public had a burning interest precisely in "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life." It is difficult to recall another book in the history of world natural science, the title of which would equally clearly reflect its essence. Perhaps Darwin had seen the title pages or the titles of his predecessors, but he simply had no desire to read them. We can only guess how the public would have reacted if Matthew had thought to release his evolutionary views under the title "The possibility of plant species changing over time through survival (selection) of the fittest." But, as we know, "The ship's construction timber ..." did not attract attention.

Secondly, and most importantly, Darwin was able to explain to his contemporaries the reasons for the variability of species on the basis of his observations. He rejected as untenable the notion of "exercise" or "non-exercise" of organs and turned to the facts of breeding new breeds of animals and plant varieties by people - to artificial selection. He showed that the indefinite variability of organisms (mutations) is inherited and can become the beginning of a new breed or variety, if it is useful to man. Transferring these data to wild species, Darwin noted that only those changes that are beneficial to the species for successful competition with others can be preserved in nature, and spoke of the struggle for existence and natural selection, to which he attributed an important, but not the only role of the driving force of evolution. Darwin not only gave theoretical calculations of natural selection, but also showed on the basis of actual material the evolution of species in space, with geographic isolation (finches) and, from the standpoint of strict logic, explained the mechanisms of divergent evolution. He also introduced the public to the fossil forms of giant sloths and armadillos, which could be seen as evolution over time. Darwin also allowed for the possibility of long-term preservation of a certain average species norm in the process of evolution by eliminating any deviant variants (for example, sparrows that survived after a storm had an average wing length), which was later called stasigenesis. Darwin was able to prove to everyone the reality of the variability of species in nature, therefore, thanks to his work, the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bthe strict constancy of species came to naught. It was pointless for the statics and fixists to continue to persist in their positions.

Development of Darwin's ideas

As a true follower of gradualism, Darwin was concerned that the absence of transitional forms could be the collapse of his theory, and attributed this lack to the incompleteness of the geological record. Darwin was also worried about the idea of ​​"dissolving" a newly acquired trait in a number of generations, with subsequent crossing with ordinary, unaltered individuals. He wrote that this objection, along with breaks in the geological record, is one of the most serious for his theory.

Darwin and his contemporaries did not know that in 1865 the Austro-Czech naturalist abbot Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) discovered the laws of heredity, according to which the hereditary trait does not “dissolve” in a number of generations, but passes (in case of recessiveness) into a heterozygous state and can be propagated in a population environment.

In support of Darwin, scientists such as the American botanist Aza Gray (1810-1888) began to come out; Alfred Wallace, Thomas Henry Huxley (Huxley; 1825-1895) - in England; the classic of comparative anatomy Karl Gegenbaur (1826-1903), Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), zoologist Fritz Müller (1821-1897) - in Germany. No less distinguished scientists criticize Darwin's ideas: Darwin's teacher, professor of geology Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873), the famous paleontologist Richard Owen, a major zoologist, paleontologist and geologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), German professor Heinrich Georg Bronn (1800-1873). 1862).

An interesting fact is that it was Bronn who translated Darwin’s book into German, who did not share his views, but who believes that the new idea has the right to exist (modern evolutionist and popularizer N.N. Vorontsov pays tribute to Bronn in this as a true scientist). Considering the views of another opponent of Darwin - Agassiz, we note that this scientist spoke about the importance of combining the methods of embryology, anatomy and paleontology to determine the position of a species or other taxon in the classification scheme. In this way, the species gets its place in the natural order of the universe. It was curious to know that Haeckel, an ardent supporter of Darwin, widely promotes the triad postulated by Agassiz, the “method of triple parallelism” already in relation to the idea of ​​kinship, and it, warmed up by Haeckel’s personal enthusiasm, captures contemporaries. All zoologists, anatomists, embryologists, and paleontologists who are anything like serious begin to build entire forests of phylogenetic trees. With the light hand of Haeckel, it spreads as the only possible idea of ​​monophyly - origin from one ancestor, which reigned supreme over the minds of scientists in the middle of the 20th century. Modern evolutionists, based on the study of the method of reproduction of the Rhodophycea algae, which is different from all other eukaryotes (fixed and male and female gametes, the absence of a cell center and any flagellar formations), speak of at least two independently formed ancestors of plants. At the same time, they found out that “The emergence of the mitotic apparatus occurred independently at least twice: in the ancestors of the kingdoms of fungi and animals, on the one hand, and in the sub-kingdoms of true algae (except for Rhodophycea) and higher plants, on the other” (exact quote, p. 319) . Thus, the origin of life is recognized not from one proto-organism, but at least from three. In any case, it is noted that already “no other scheme, like the proposed one, can turn out to be monophyletic” (ibid.). The theory of symbiogenesis, which explains the appearance of lichens (combination of algae and fungus) also led scientists to polyphyly (origin from several unrelated organisms) (p. 318). And this is the most important achievement of the theory. In addition, recent research suggests that they are finding more and more examples showing "the prevalence of paraphilia and in the origin of relatively closely related taxa." For example, in the “subfamily of African tree mice Dendromurinae: the genus Deomys is molecularly close to the true Murinae mice, and the genus Steatomys is close in DNA structure to the giant mice of the subfamily Cricetomyinae. At the same time, the morphological similarity of Deomys and Steatomys is undoubted, which indicates the paraphyletic origin of Dendromurinae. Therefore, the phylogenetic classification needs to be revised, based not only on external similarity, but also on the structure of the genetic material (p. 376). The experimental biologist and theorist August Weismann (1834-1914) spoke in a fairly clear form about the cell nucleus as the carrier of heredity. Regardless of Mendel, he came to the most important conclusion about the discreteness of hereditary units. Mendel was so ahead of his time that his work remained virtually unknown for 35 years. Weismann's ideas (sometime after 1863) became the property of a wide range of biologists, a subject for discussion. The most fascinating pages of the origin of the doctrine of chromosomes, the emergence of cytogenetics, the creation of T.G. Morgan of the chromosome theory of heredity in 1912-1916. – all this was strongly stimulated by August Weismann. Investigating the embryonic development of sea urchins, he proposed to distinguish between two forms of cell division - equatorial and reduction, i.e. approached the discovery of meiosis - the most important stage of combinative variability and the sexual process. But Weisman could not avoid some speculation in his ideas about the mechanism of heredity transmission. He thought that the entire set of discrete factors - "determinants" - have only cells of the so-called. "germ line". Some determinants get into some of the cells of the "soma" (body), others - others. Differences in the sets of determinants explain the specialization of soma cells. So, we see that, having correctly predicted the existence of meiosis, Weismann was mistaken in predicting the fate of the distribution of genes. He also extended the principle of selection to competition between cells, and since cells are carriers of certain determinants, he spoke of their struggle with each other. The most modern concepts of "selfish DNA", "selfish gene", developed at the turn of the 70s and 80s. 20th century in many respects have something in common with the Weismann competition of determinants. Weisman emphasized that the "germ plasm" is isolated from the cells of the soma of the whole organism, and therefore spoke of the impossibility of inheriting the characteristics acquired by the body (soma) under the influence of the environment. But many Darwinists accepted this idea of ​​Lamarck. Weisman's harsh criticism of this concept caused a negative attitude towards him and his theory, and then to the study of chromosomes in general, from orthodox Darwinists (those who recognized selection as the only factor in evolution).

The rediscovery of Mendel's laws took place in 1900 in three different countries: Holland (Hugo de Vries 1848-1935), Germany (Karl Erich Correns 1864-1933) and Austria (Erich von Tschermak 1871-1962), which simultaneously discovered Mendel's forgotten work. In 1902, Walter Sutton (Seton, 1876-1916) gave a cytological justification for Mendelism: diploid and haploid sets, homologous chromosomes, the conjugation process during meiosis, the prediction of the linkage of genes located on the same chromosome, the concept of dominance and recessiveness, as well as allelic genes - all this was demonstrated on cytological preparations, based on the exact calculations of Mendeleev's algebra, and very different from hypothetical family trees, from the style of naturalistic Darwinism of the 19th century. The mutational theory of de Vries (1901-1903) was not accepted not only by the conservatism of orthodox Darwinists, but also by the fact that on other plant species, researchers were unable to obtain the wide range of variability achieved by him on Oenothera lamarkiana (it is now known that evening primrose is a polymorphic species , which has chromosomal translocations, some of which are heterozygous, while homozygotes are lethal.De Vries chose a very successful object for obtaining mutations and at the same time not entirely successful, since in his case it was necessary to extend the results achieved to other plant species). De Vries and his Russian predecessor, the botanist Sergei Ivanovich Korzhinsky (1861-1900), who wrote in 1899 (Petersburg) about sudden spasmodic "heterogeneous" deviations, thought that the possibility of the manifestation of macromutations rejected Darwin's theory. At the dawn of the formation of genetics, many concepts were expressed, according to which evolution did not depend on the external environment. The Dutch botanist Jan Paulus Lotsi (1867-1931), who wrote the book Evolution by Hybridization, also came under criticism from the Darwinists, where he rightly drew attention to the role of hybridization in plant speciation.

If in the middle of the 18th century the contradiction between transformism (continuous change) and the discreteness of taxonomic units of taxonomy seemed insurmountable, then in the 19th century it was thought that gradualistic trees built on the basis of kinship came into conflict with the discreteness of hereditary material. Evolution by visually distinguishable large mutations could not be accepted by the gradualism of the Darwinists.

Trust in mutations and their role in shaping the variability of a species was restored by Thomas Gent Morgan (1886-1945) when this American embryologist and zoologist turned to genetic research in 1910 and eventually settled on the famous Drosophila. Probably, one should not be surprised that 20-30 years after the events described, it was population geneticists who came to evolution not through macromutations (which began to be recognized as unlikely), but through a steady and gradual change in the frequencies of allelic genes in populations. Since macroevolution by that time seemed to be an indisputable continuation of the studied phenomena of microevolution, gradualness began to seem an inseparable feature of the evolutionary process. There was a return to Leibniz's "law of continuity" at a new level, and in the first half of the 20th century a synthesis of evolution and genetics could take place. Once again, once-opposite concepts have united. (names, conclusions of evolutionists and chronology of events are taken from Nikolay Nikolaevich Vorontsov, "Development of evolutionary ideas in biology, 1999)

Recall that in the light of the latest biological ideas put forward from the positions of materialism, now again there is a distance from the law of continuity, now not genetics, but the evolutionists themselves. The famous S.J. Gould raised the issue of punctualism (punctuated equilibrium), as opposed to generally accepted gradualism, in order to explain the reasons for the already obvious picture of the absence of transitional forms among fossils, i.e. the impossibility of building a truly continuous line of kinship from the origins to the present. There is always a break in the geological record.

Modern theories of biological evolution

Synthetic theory of evolution

The synthetic theory in its current form was formed as a result of rethinking a number of provisions of classical Darwinism from the standpoint of genetics at the beginning of the 20th century. After the rediscovery of Mendel's laws (in 1901), the evidence of the discrete nature of heredity, and especially after the creation of theoretical population genetics by the works of R. Fisher (-), J. B. S. Haldane, Jr. (), S. Wright ( ; ), the teaching Darwin acquired a solid genetic foundation.

Neutral theory of molecular evolution

The theory of neutral evolution does not dispute the decisive role of natural selection in the development of life on Earth. The discussion is about the proportion of mutations that have an adaptive value. Most biologists accept a number of results of the theory of neutral evolution, although they do not share some of the strong statements originally made by M. Kimura.

Epigenetic theory of evolution

The main provisions of the epigenetic theory of evolution were formulated in the th year by M. A. Shishkin on the basis of the ideas of I. I. Schmalhausen and K. H. Waddington. As the main substrate of natural selection, the theory considers a holistic phenotype, and selection not only fixes beneficial changes, but also takes part in their creation. The fundamental influence on heredity is exerted not by the genome, but by the epigenetic system (ES) - a set of factors affecting ontogenesis. From ancestors to descendants, the general organization of ES is transmitted, which forms the organism in the course of its individual development, and selection leads to the stabilization of a number of successive ontogenies, eliminating deviations from the norm (morphoses) and forming a stable development trajectory (creod). The evolution according to ETE consists in the transformation of one creod into another under the perturbing influence of the environment. In response to the perturbation, the ES destabilizes, as a result of which the development of organisms along deviating paths of development becomes possible, and multiple morphoses arise. Some of these morphoses receive a selective advantage, and over the course of subsequent generations, their ES develops a new stable development trajectory, a new creod is formed.

Ecosystem theory of evolution

This term is understood as a system of ideas and approaches to the study of evolution, focusing on the features and patterns of evolution of ecosystems at various levels - biocenoses, biomes and the biosphere as a whole, and not taxa (species, families, classes, etc.). The provisions of the ecosystem theory of evolution are based on two postulates:

• Naturalness and discreteness of ecosystems. An ecosystem is a real-life (and not isolated for the convenience of the researcher) object, which is a system of interacting biological and non-biological (eg soil, water) objects territorially and functionally delimited from other similar objects. The boundaries between ecosystems are clear enough to speak about the independent evolution of neighboring objects.
• The decisive role of ecosystem interactions in determining the rate and direction of population evolution. Evolution is seen as a process of creating and filling ecological niches or licenses.

The ecosystem theory of evolution operates with such terms as coherent and incoherent evolution, ecosystem crises of various levels. The modern ecosystem theory of evolution is based mainly on the works of Soviet and Russian evolutionists: V. A. Krasilov, S. M. Razumovsky, A. G. Ponomarenko, V. V. Zherikhin and others.

Evolutionary doctrine and religion

Although many unclear questions about the mechanisms of evolution remain in modern biology, the vast majority of biologists do not doubt the existence of biological evolution as a phenomenon. However, some believers of a number of religions find some provisions of evolutionary biology contrary to their religious beliefs, in particular, the dogma of the creation of the world by God. In this regard, in a part of society, almost from the moment of the birth of evolutionary biology, there has been a certain opposition to this teaching from the religious side (see creationism), which at some times and in some countries has reached criminal sanctions for teaching evolutionary doctrine (which caused, for example, the scandalous well-known "monkey process" in the USA in g.).

It should be noted that the accusations of atheism and the denial of religion, cited by some opponents of evolutionary doctrine, are based to a certain extent on a misunderstanding of the nature of scientific knowledge: in science, no theory, including the theory of biological evolution, can either confirm or deny the existence of such otherworldly subjects, like God (if only because God, when creating living nature, could use evolution, as the theological doctrine of "theistic evolution" claims).

On the other hand, the theory of evolution, being a scientific theory, considers the biological world as part of the material world and relies on its natural and self-sufficient, that is, its natural origin, which is therefore alien to any otherworldly or divine intervention; alien for the reason that the growth of scientific knowledge, penetrating into the previously incomprehensible and explainable only by the activity of otherworldly forces, somehow beats the soil from religion (when explaining the essence of the phenomenon, the need for a religious explanation disappears, because there is a convincing natural explanation). In this regard, evolutionary teaching can be aimed at denying the existence of extranatural forces, or rather their interference in the process of development of the living world, which one way or another suggests religious systems.

Efforts to oppose evolutionary biology to religious anthropology are also mistaken. From the point of view of the methodology of science, the popular thesis "man descended from apes" is only an oversimplification (see reductionism) of one of the conclusions of evolutionary biology (about the place of man as a biological species on the phylogenetic tree of living nature), if only because the concept of "man" is ambiguous: man as a subject of physical anthropology is by no means identical to man as a subject of philosophical anthropology, and it is incorrect to reduce philosophical anthropology to physical one.

Many believers of different religions do not find evolutionary teachings contrary to their faith. The theory of biological evolution (along with many other sciences - from astrophysics to geology and radiochemistry) contradicts only the literal reading of the sacred texts that tell about the creation of the world, and for some believers this is the reason for rejecting almost all the conclusions of the natural sciences that study the past of the material world (literalist creationism ).

Among believers who profess the doctrine of literal creationism, there are a number of scientists who are trying to find scientific evidence for their doctrine (the so-called "scientific creationism"). However, the scientific community disputes the validity of this evidence.

Literature

• Berg L.S. Nomogenesis, or Evolution based on regularities. - Petersburg: State Publishing House, 1922. - 306 p.
• Kordyum V. A. Evolution and the biosphere. - K.: Naukova Dumka, 1982. - 264 p.
• Krasilov V. A. Unsolved problems of the theory of evolution. - Vladivostok: DVNTs AN SSSR, 1986. - S. 140.
• Lima de Faria A. Evolution without selection: Autoevolution of form and function: Per. from English. - M.: Mir, 1991. - S. 455.
• Nazarov V.I. Evolution not according to Darwin: Changing the evolutionary model. Tutorial. Ed. 2nd, corrected .. - M .: Publishing house LKI, 2007. - 520 p.
• Tchaikovsky Yu.V. The science of life development. Experience of the theory of evolution. - M.: Association of scientific publications KMK, 2006. - 712 p.
• Golubovsky M. D. Non-canonical legacy changes // Nature. - 2001. - No. 8. - S. 3–9.
• Meyen S.V. The path to a new synthesis, or where do homologous series lead? // Knowledge is power. - 1972. - № 8.

Evolution is a scientific theory that essentially points to the change of species over time. There are many different mechanisms for changing species, but most of them are based on the idea of ​​natural selection. Evolution by natural selection was the first scientific theory to provide evidence for how animals and plants change over time, and the mechanism for how this happens.

History of the theory of evolution

The idea that traits are passed down from parents to offspring has been around since the time of ancient Greek philosophers. In the mid-1700s, Carol Linnaeus came up with his taxonomic naming system, which grouped by species and implied that there was an evolutionary relationship between species within the same group.

In the late 1700s, the first theories emerged and changed over time. Scientists such as the Comte de Buffon and Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, proposed the idea that species changed over time, but no single person could explain how or why this happened. They also kept their speculations secret, as their theories were controversial relative to the accepted religious views of the era.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a student of the Comte de Buffon, was the first to publicly state the change of species over time. However, part of his theory was wrong. Lamarck proposed that acquired traits are inherited. Georges Cuvier was able to prove the fallacy of this assertion. He also had evidence for species that evolved and became extinct.

Cuvier believed in catastrophism and believed that these changes and disappearances in nature occurred suddenly and violently. James Hutton and Charles Lyell countered Georges Cuvier's arguments with the idea of ​​uniformitarianism. This theory states that changes in nature occur slowly and accumulate over time.

Darwin and natural selection

Sometimes called "survival of the fittest", "natural selection" is best known from Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

In the book, Darwin proposed that species with traits best suited to their environment live long enough to reproduce and pass on those "fortunate" traits to their offspring. Over time, only the "fittest" traits of the species are retained. Eventually, over a period of time, these small adaptations can create new species.

At the time, Charles Darwin was not the only person to come up with this idea. Alfred Russel Wallace also had evidence and came to similar conclusions as Darwin. They even collaborated and presented joint findings. Armed with testimonials from around the world through numerous travels, the ideas of Darwin and Wallace received positive reviews in the scientific community. The partnership ended when Darwin published his book.

One very important part of the theory of evolution through natural selection is the understanding that species cannot evolve. They can only adapt to the environment. Adaptations add up over time and eventually lead to the evolution of the species. It can also lead to the emergence of new species, and sometimes the extinction of older ones.

Evidence for evolution

There is a lot of evidence supporting the theory of evolution. Darwin relied on similar anatomy of species to tie them together. He also had some fossil evidence that showed small changes in the body structure of the species over time, often resulting in vestigial structures. Of course, the fossil record is incomplete and has "missing links". With today's technology, there is plenty of other evidence for evolution. These include the similarity of embryos across species, the same DNA sequences found in all species, and an understanding of how DNA mutations work in microevolution. Even more fossil evidence has been found since Darwin's time, although there are still many gaps in the fossil record.

Controversy over the theory of evolution

Today, the theory of evolution is often portrayed in the media as a controversial issue. The development of primates and the idea that humans evolved from apes have been a major debate between scientific and religious communities. Politicians and the courts decided whether schools should teach evolution, or whether they should teach alternative viewpoints such as intelligent design and creationism.

The case of the State of Tennessee v. John Scopes, also known as the Monkey Trial, became a famous legal battle over the teaching of evolution in schools. In 1925, a teacher named John Scopes was arrested for illegally teaching evolution in a Tennessee science class. It was the first major court case for evolution and brought attention to a previously taboo subject.

Theory of evolution in biology

The theory of evolution is often seen as the main overarching theme that unifies all topics. This includes genetics, population biology, anatomy and physiology, and embryology. While this theory itself has evolved and expanded over time, the principles outlined by Darwin in the 1800s still hold true today.

Some people, having heard such concepts as "the theory of evolution" or "Darwinism", may assume that these concepts are only in the field of biology and have no meaning in their lives. In fact, this assumption is wrong. Because in reality the theory of evolution is not so much a biological concept as the basis of a distorted philosophy that has become widespread on earth. This philosophy, which hides how and for what we actually appeared, is called "materialism". Materialism, or otherwise "materiality", claims that the basis of everything is matter and, thus, denies the existence of the Creator of everything, i.e. Allah.

Such a thought, which reduces everything to materialism, turns a person into an egoistic being who thinks only about material things and does not attach importance to spiritual values. This is the beginning of the collapse of human life. Materialism is not limited to harming individuals. First of all, materialism, destroying the basic values ​​in the state and the people, creates a soulless and insensitive society that attaches importance only to things. Such a society, in the absence of such concepts and values ​​as love for the motherland, justice, devotion, brotherhood, decency, self-sacrifice, honor and morality, is subject to disintegration in a short period of time. Consequently, materialism is a serious threat to the social and political structure of any country.

Another harm of materialism lies in the fact that it is the basis for the development of anarchy and the ideology of "divide and rule." At the head of these ideologies is communism, a natural political consequence of materialistic philosophy. Communism, destroying to the root such sacred concepts as religion, state, family, personifies a fundamental ideology directed against the unitary structure of the state.

The theory of evolution is of great importance exactly at this stage, because it is the so-called scientific foundation of materialism, on which the communist ideology relies. Communism, taking the theory of evolution as a starting point, tries to elevate and present its ideology as correct. That's why the founder of communism, Karl Marx, said of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which forms the basis of the theory of evolution, that: "This is exactly the book that includes our view of natural history."

Today, all kinds of remarks of materialists, including the ideas of Marx, are considered rotten. Because the theory of evolution, which is the basis of materialism, and in fact nothing more than a dogma of the 19th century, has been completely refuted by the discoveries of modern science. Science has proved and continues to prove the inconsistency of the assumptions of the materialists, who do not allow anything but matter, and shows all living things as the result of a higher creation.

The purpose of this book is to bring to the attention of the reader the scientific facts that refute the theory of evolution, as well as to acquaint with the true face and true purpose of this scientific fraud. It is also very important that the supporters of the theory of evolution did not put up significant resistance to this book. Because they realize that such an act will only help society to better understand what kind of deception evolution is.