understanding others essay

1. Write a brief biography of Charles Darwin.
Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury. Charles was brought up into a wealthy and well-connected family with many intelligent relatives. As Darwin grew up around these inspiring people he planned to follow a medical career and studied at the Edinburgh University but later switched to Cambridge. Darwin studied science and was determined to discover how the world evolved, other than what most people believed which was that God did it. As his knowledge grew Darwin invented the theory of evolution through discovering the Galapagos Islands, going on voyages and reading about other theories. Darwin worked on his theory for 20 years. After learning another naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace also had developed similar ideas, the two joint and announced the discovery in 1858 by publishing a book called “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” The book was extremely controversial because the logical extension of Darwin’s theory was the Homo sapiens were another form of an animal. Darwin was strongly attacked by people, especially the church. However his ideas soon gained agreement and became the new orthodoxy. Darwin died on the 19th of April 1882 and buried in Westminster Abbey.

2. Explain The theory of evolution.
The theory of evolution is the slow process of different specials of animals and plants. Charles Darwin also stated that these animal and plants produce too many offspring meaning many of them will have to compete to consume food. Many of these offspring will die from the lack of food they feed. For example there are many tadpoles and not enough food for all of them. So in the end there are many more tadpoles then there are frogs. He concluded that the species that have advantages are more likely to survive and reproduce than those without these advantages. So a bird with a large strong beak will have more chance in survival that a bird with a small beak. The larger one could crack open a nut if they are in restricted conditions but a smaller one would die. These stronger and more advantages species will reproduce at a higher rate. They can also inherit other advantages from other variations.

3. Evidence for the theory of evolution

Charles Darwin compiled evidence for his theory of evolution for about 20 years. Between 1842 and 1844 he wrote a 230 page essay summarizing everything he had discovered and the evidence for it. In the 1850’s he began to write a book about all of the things he had discovered. Alfred Russel Wallace had come up with the same idea in 1858 and the two joint to explain to the science community of their theory. Fossils are found in rocks and are composed of layers of sediment that have settles in ancient oceans Lakes Rivers. Palaeontologists can find these fossils and compare them with animals that are living today. This gives information about ancient species and can go back to as much as 150 million years. This is the main evidences Charles Darwin had for his theory. Evidence also shows the genes from some bacteria have the same sequences to the genes found in humans. Using bones and finding the difference to them 2 different animal’s shows how they may be related by the similarity of their bones.

4. Evidence against Evolution

Some do not believe that a cluster of non-living compounds and elements congregated and combines to generate something that has life
A famous American biologist Stanley Miller has observed the possibility of dead matter coming back to life and found that it is inconsistent.
Genetic mutations may occur which make the offspring appear physically or otherwise different from the parent
Many mathematicians and biological researchers proved by numerical statistics that the mathematical probability of a living cell or a molecule of protein to come into being all by its self is nothing.
Laboratory experiments have failed to prove that genetic mutation can lead to creation of different species.

5. Explain your personal view about the theory:

I personally believe Charles Darwins theory. It all makes sense that everything evolved throughout time. I do not believe that Adam and Eve just magically appeared and were the first two on the earth without any explanation. 6. What does Darwin mean by ‘survival of the fittest’?

Survival of the fittest means that the more advantaged and stronger the species is the more of the chance they will survive. For example if a bird has a stronger beak and it flies to a habitat that doesn’t have a lot of food it has the advantage of using its beak to crack open a seed. On the other hand a bird that has a small beak will die from lack of food.

7. What happens if an animal is not well adapted or ‘fit’?
If an animal is not well adapted of fit, the species will eventually die out because they have to compete with other species. If their habitat or location changes or disturbed then this is another factor that will kill a species that is not adapted or ‘fit’.
An example is a fish called the Cichlids which have over 1600 species that have been found and estimated about 3000 cichlids which haven’t been discovered. Because of the mass amount of different types of Cichlids many of them have adapted to survive longer in the oceans.

8.
Humans share many characteristics with mammals. Human females give birth to their young and produce milk to nourish them, which is the same for mammals.Humans are also very alike to chimpanzees and orang-utans. Their hands look very similar and are used in similar ways.Geneticists have found the humans and chimpanzees share 99% of the same genes and still humans and chimpanzees look and act different.
Common things that most animals and humans both have are eyes and spinal cords. There are a wide variety of animals that have spinal cords such as fish, rabbits, and snakes. These vertebrate animals, although very different, are all distantly related to humans because of this trait.

9.
Read the article above and explain below the increase in the number of black squirrels using ideas of natural selection. Write about: variation, competition, survival and reproduction
The variation in the squirrels is their colour. The competition is between the black and grey squirrel, the grey are not mating as much as black because the female grey squirrels prefer to mate with the black males, this is called sex selection. The survival of the grey squirrels is now in danger because of the sex selection of the female squirrels only reproducing with black.