Word: darwin
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Time and again, biologists are finding that Darwin had it right: evolution is the best way to explain the patterns of nature. "You just can't even start to make sense of all this data without a framework of evolution," says Günter Wagner, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University...
...Darwin proposed that natural selection could gradually transform a species. Scientists have observed thousands of cases of natural selection in action. They've documented that beaks of finches on the Galápagos Islands have gotten thicker when droughts forced the birds to crack tough seeds to survive. They've observed bacteria develop resistance to drugs that were believed to be invincible. Now biologists are applying DNA-sequencing technology to natural selection, which lets them identify the individual genetic changes that boost reproductive success...
...they can gradually evolve into new species. "We now have, I think, a good understanding of how new species arise - that is, how biological diversity is created," says Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago and the author of the new book Why Evolution Is True. "Darwin made little inroad into the problem, despite the title of his magnum opus...
Biologists have also found plenty of evidence to support Darwin's other major claim: that different species share a common ancestry. Over the past 15 years, for example, paleontologists have found several fossils of whales with legs, linking modern whales to their terrestrial ancestors. Besides studying fossils, biologists can discover the genealogy of species by looking at their DNA. The fossil record points to hippos and other hoofed mammals as being the closest living relatives of whales. So does their DNA. Our own DNA contains clues to the bonds we share with the rest of life - it turns...
...long way from understanding the entire genome, but as they get to know its parts better, they're getting a more precise comprehension of one of the most important features of evolution: how complex organs evolve. The notion that something as intricate as an eye could have evolved, Darwin wrote, "seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree." But he argued that new complex organs could evolve through a series of intermediate forms...