Word: darwins
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...Darwin had no way of knowing this, since he had no way of examining DNA. If he did, he might well have rethought one of his most potent metaphors for evolution: the tree of life. It's not that the metaphor is wrong. Scientists regularly reconstruct evolutionary branches today. When a new disease breaks out, for example, the fastest way to figure out what to do is to determine what the pathogen is related...
...Darwin predicted this. "We can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history," he wrote at the end of On the Origin of Species. He saw his work not as the end of biology but as a beginning...