Hi,
So today, I am going to talk about evolution. We have mentioned this before in
our Galapagos Ecosystem series
but we’ve never gone over exactly what it is.
So before Charles Darwin thought of his theory of evolution, the majority of
people in Europe thought that all species were unrelated and that humans were
not related to animals. This was mostly based on Christianity. Darwin studied
hundreds of different species and on the
Galápagos Islands, he first started to form his theory of evolution.
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, as it was later called, is
best explained by the example of the giraffe.
Let's assume that giraffes have short necks (as they did many centuries ago).
Now a mother has two children. By chance, one has a slightly longer neck. This
is a coincidence. As the giraffes feed on the lower leaves of the trees, these
slower disappear. There aren't enough leaves for the giraffes. Thus the
giraffe with the shorter neck soon starves to death and only the giraffes with
longer necks survive. They then have children who also have slightly longer
necks. This continues which means that over many generations, the giraffes
develop longer necks.
Examples of evolution can be found everywhere. Probably the best known is the
extremely fast
evolution of the Galapagos Islands. A diverse number of species developed in just a few thousand years. Apart
from that, the evolution of diverse animals in the whole world is very fast.
If you imagined the whole history of the earth as a day, life only evolved
enough to come onto land from 9pm to 10pm. So all land plants and animals only
evolved in the last 2 to 3 hours, while humans only turned up at around 11:58
pm!
Thank you for reading!
Your Green World Blog Team💚
Image:
Charles Darwin:
This image, owned by
Corin Royal Drummond (on flickr.com),
is licensed under
CC BY-SA 2.0.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/science/evolution-scientific-theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/topics/resource-library-evolution/
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/science/evolution-scientific-theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/topics/resource-library-evolution/
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