The theory of evolution as a science. History and correlation of various theories of the evolution of the organic world. Carl Linnaeus and the role of his work in the development of evolutionary theory

Unfortunately, the field of theoretical biology, which deals with evolutionary theory, is initially an arena for the clash of class interests. It is understandable: evolutionary teaching calls into question religious dogmas, and religion is a proven way for thousands of years to lead the oppressed masses away from the struggle for a just world. This seems to be related to the spread of a narrow-minded, simplistic view of evolutionary theories among the population. Therefore, I had to put aside the conversation about the achievements of molecular biology and genetics and take up the explanation of the correlations of the evolutionary teachings that exist today.

For a long time, mankind has been under the undeniable influence of the creationist paradigm. Creationism (from Latin creatio, genus p. creationis - creation) is a worldview concept according to which the main forms of the organic world (life), humanity, the planet Earth, and the world as a whole are considered as directly created by the creator or god.

Creationism has not always existed. So, in the Australian tribe Arunta believe that the world has existed since eternity. In ancient times, there lived half-animals, half-humans, who, through witchcraft, turned one object into another; the question of where these creatures came from, the Australians do not even ask. They believe that the Sun came from a woman with a burning brand, who climbed into the sky and turned into a fire there.

“The concept of “creation of the world” took shape in the era of the decomposition of the primitive communal system. Pottery contributed to the formation of the idea that the world was molded from clay. In Elephantine, they told about the ancient Egyptian god Khnum, who molded the world from Nile clay on a potter's wheel, like pottery.

So, apparently, the biblical myth arose about Adam, whom God fashioned from clay.

The first evolutionary paradigms were formed in Ancient Hellas. So, Anaximenes (585 - 525 BC) believed that people are descended from fish.

Empedocles (c. 490 - c. 430 BC) believed that heads without necks, arms without shoulders, eyes without foreheads, hair, internal organs were carried in space in a state of Enmity, but in a fit of Love they united into freaks, centaurs and hermaphrodites; only the most expedient forms survived: something similar to Darwin's natural selection took place ...

“Thus, from the mixture of elements, endless hosts of creatures

In images diverse and marvelous in appearance, they occur.

Empedocles, however, does not speak of the unidirectional evolutionary process. Love and Enmity replace each other in cycles, in the beginning there was a Golden Age.

Aristotle, on the other hand, arranged living beings from the lowest to the highest in the famous "ladder of nature."

The Roman Lucretius Carus (c. 99 BC - 55 BC) believed that butterflies used to be flowers.

The path to all this nascent multicolored evolutionary thought was closed in the Middle Ages. For many centuries in Europe, the dominance of the creationist paradigm was established, which was formed by the priestly circles of the ancient slave states of Babylon and Egypt. This paradigm, along with other measures, reliably ensured the class domination of the feudal lords and began to be questioned only after the bourgeoisie began to establish a new system. There are as many species as God created them.

But already Carl Linnaeus (Swedish Carl Linnaeus, Carl Linné, lat. Carolus Linnaeus, after receiving the nobility in 1761 - Carl von Linnaeus, Carl von Linné; May 23, 1707, Roshult - January 10, 1778, Uppsala), the author of "The System of Nature ”and the binary nomenclature accepted to this day in biology (Latin generic and specific name, for example Homo sapiens - Reasonable Man), by the end of his life believed that new species could arise as a result of crossing. Linnaeus attributed man to the class of mammals, to the order of primates, along with monkeys, semi-monkeys and a number of animals that have nothing to do with primates, for example, with bats.

The first holistic evolutionary teaching belongs to Jean Baptiste Lamarck (French Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet Lamarck; August 1, 1744 - December 18, 1829). It was stated by him in the work "Philosophy of Zoology".

Like Aristotle's "ladder of beings", Lamarck arranged living beings into steps, levels - gradations. The main evolution according to Lamarck is the "striving for perfection". The results of exercise or non-exercise of the organs are inherited. Lamarck's most popular example is with giraffes. First, environmental conditions changed: the ancestors of giraffes had to stretch their necks for leaves. Their necks lengthened like muscles during exercise. This is inherited.

Evolution according to Lamarck is smooth, like according to Darwin, without sharp jumps. In Soviet times, Vavilov's opponent, Trofim Lysenko, tried to smuggle views close to Lamarxist into biology under the label "Soviet creative Darwinism", which caused considerable harm to science.

However, recent data from the field of epigenetic studies, which show that the nature expression(implementation of information encoded in nucleic acids into protein structures) genes can change under the influence of external factors (the DNA structure itself is not affected), and these changes can be inherited; and also, just the fact that external factors can cause mutations opens the way neo-Lamarckism. There is no doubt that Lamarck himself believed the origin of man from apes, although he was forced to disguise his views.

The path to evolutionary doctrine was irrevocably opened by Charles Robert Darwin (Eng. Charles Robert Darwin; February 12, 1809 - April 19, 1882). During a trip around the world on the ship "Beagle" (1831 - 1836), young Darwin saw evolution in space.

A huge number of animals in different parts of the globe, and most importantly - the Galapagos Islands: the shells of land turtles, varying in shape, indicating the island of origin - all this contributed to insight.

The beaks of the Galápagos finches were the key to Darwin's idea that species change over time.

However, Darwin was in no hurry. He continued to gather facts. The proofs were to be based on selection materials, in which England has always been famous for its success. An important role in the teachings of Darwin, in his ideas about the struggle for existence, was played by the theory of Malthus, according to which uncontrolled population growth should lead to famine on Earth.

The evolutionary doctrine of Darwin is a natural product of the development of capitalist society. It is noteworthy that at the same time as Darwin, the nature explorer of Southeast Asia, 35-year-old Alfred Wallace, came to the same conclusions. At the beginning of the summer of 1858, Darwin received a package from Wallace from the Malay Islands, who asked Darwin to consider his, Wallace, theory natural selection. Darwin did not even have a question: to hide the work of Wallace, who knew nothing about Darwin's developments, or to publish his own manuscript in advance. Darwin could not act ungentlemanly. He was a man of honor. Darwin's advice was rescued by his friends: the geologist Charles Lyell and the botanist Joseph Hooker. They recommended that both papers be sent to the Linnean Society as soon as possible - a short extract from Darwin's book and an essay by Wallace. “Dear sir,” they wrote to the secretary of the society. "The enclosed papers deal with the question of the formation of varieties, and represent the results of the investigations of two indefatigable naturalists, Mr. Charles Darwin and Mr. Alfred Wallace." Darwin did not tire of informing the public that Wallace's work was better, but Wallace did not lag behind Darwin, he said that Darwin's work was better ... However, as we know, history ordered Charles Darwin to be made a symbol of evolutionary teaching.

What characterizes the teachings of Charles Darwin? This must be identified immediately in order to understand the attitude of other evolutionary teachings to classical Darwinism. Darwin distinguished 2 main types of variability: certain (group) And indefinite (individual). With a certain variability, all the offspring of an organism change in a similar way under the influence of environmental factors. Now this change is called modification or non-hereditary. For example, dwarf growth due to lack of food. This type of mutability is not inherited.

Uncertain variability is now called hereditary or mutational. The factor of evolution is the latter.

combinative(when crossing) variability Darwin did not assign a decisive role in evolution. Other factors of evolution according to Darwin - struggle for existence And natural selection(from the English "selection" - can be translated as "natural selection"). Evolution according to Darwin is random. Small random changes serve as material for natural selection. If at artificial selection the selector is a person, and he selects qualities that are beneficial to himself, then with natural selection, the selector is nature: individuals with qualities that are useful for survival are preserved and produce offspring. Special mention should be made unconscious selection. A person does not set goals, for example, he simply does not send good laying hens for meat, and the egg production of chickens increases with generations. Evolution according to Darwin is a slow progressive process, without sharp jumps. Quantity gradually turns into a new quality. According to Darwin, evolution does not have a definite final goal. Species are predominantly monophyletic in origin, and the evolutionary process develops according to the principle of divergence: species are divided into genera, genera into families, families into orders, orders into classes, etc., like a tree. According to Darwin, microevolution (the formation of new species) and macroevolution (the formation of large taxa, for example, classes) are one process.

Microevolution within species and Darwinian natural selection can be observed in nature in real time. Thus, the birch moth butterflies (Biston betularia), common to England, are a classic example. The melanistic form of carbonaria first attracted attention as a rare mutant in 1848 in Manchester. Between 1848 and 1898. the frequency of this form in industrial areas increased rapidly; it became the common form, while the typical greyish form became rare. The allele frequency for black coloration is estimated to have increased from 1 to 99% in 50 generations from 1848 to 1898. The reason is the appearance of soot and soot on birch trunks due to the growth of industry, which made the form with light wings vulnerable to birds and gave advantage form with dark wings. This phenomenon is called industrial melanism.

Darwin's theory quickly gained popularity, but also quickly lost it under the pressure of criticism. At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century, very few biologists shared the concept of natural selection, however, the very idea of ​​the evolution of the organic world with the advent of Darwin's teachings in their midst was never questioned again. This is the main merit of Darwin: he opened the way for evolutionary theory and will cause hatred among religious apologists until the very end of the era of class society.

In the 1920s, the Synthetic Theory of Evolution (STE) was born, which is a synthesis of Darwinism and population genetics and is the dominant paradigm in modern biology. Darwinism is being rehabilitated. Article by S. S. Chetverikov “On some moments of the evolutionary process from the point of view modern genetics”(1926) essentially became the core of the future synthetic theory of evolution and the basis for the further synthesis of Darwinism and genetics. In this article, Chetverikov showed the compatibility of the principles of genetics with the theory of natural selection and laid the foundations of evolutionary genetics. The main evolutionary publication by S. S. Chetverikov was translated into English in the laboratory of J. Haldane, but was never published abroad. In the works of J. Haldane, N. V. Timofeev-Resovsky and F. G. Dobzhansky, the ideas expressed by S. S. Chetverikov spread to the West, where almost simultaneously R. Fisher expressed very similar views on the evolution of dominance. In the English-language literature, among the creators of STE, the names of F. Dobzhansky, J. Huxley, E. Mayr, B. Rensch, J. Stebbins are most often mentioned. This is, of course, far from a complete list. Only among the Russian scientists, at least, one should name I. I. Shmalgauzen, N. V. Timofeev-Resovsky, G. F. Gause, N. P. Dubinin, A. L. Takhtadzhyan. Of the British scientists, the role of J. B. S. Haldane, Jr., D. Lack, C. Waddington, G. de Beer is great. German historians mention the names of E. Baur, W. Zimmermann, W. Ludwig, G. Heberer and others among the active creators of STE.

The most striking difference between STE and classical Darwinism is that the main unit of evolution in it is no longer a separate organism, but a population, i.e., a set of organisms of the same species that exist in a certain territory or water area in free panmixia, i.e., the exchange of genes. reproductive isolation, for example, geographical (limitation of panmixia due to the appearance of geographical barriers, for example, straits or mountain ranges, which prevents free crossing), or genetic and ethological (the differences in behavior that have arisen, for example, in the signals of interaction between partners, interfere with crossing), or any other, leads to vision. Every population has a certain set of mutations, some of which are beneficial, but most of which are harmful. Therefore, figuratively speaking, the population has many points of support in the form of a set of different alleles of genes, which increases its stability, provides the opportunity to respond plastically to changes in environmental conditions.

I. I. Shmalgauzen introduced the concepts stabilizing And driving selection. Under constant environmental conditions, all deviations from the norm are eliminated, this is a stabilizing selection, but as soon as environmental conditions begin to change, driving selection is turned on, and mutant alleles of genes gain an advantage.

I will not dwell on STE in detail, so as not to overload the article, which was conceived as popular science. Mathematical models of STE are complex and are, in fact, substantiations that explain the existing contradictions. I will only note that STE, as in classical Darwinism, is based on the concept typhogenesis- evolution based on chance. Microevolution and macroevolution are one and the same, only the scales differ. Evolution has no final goal, it is not directed anywhere. Preference is given to divergence and monophyletic origin of species. Evolution, according to STE, is a slow progressive process, without revolutionary leaps.

Sometimes the layman's objections to Darwin's teachings revolve around real contradictions. The question of a transitional form between ape and man, of course, cannot cause anything but bewilderment and regret about the illiteracy of the population.

Another thing is the question of transitional forms between, for example, reptiles and birds ... Indeed: well, an ancestor jumped from branch to branch, even if not birds, but flying squirrels, well, an accidental mutation arose: a small fold of skin. What evolutionary significance could it have? How could such a fold of skin play a decisive role in survival, make jumps more efficient, unless, of course, a large fold with aerodynamic characteristics immediately arose? The house of cards of Darwin's slow progressive process begins to stagger by small random changes, and it seems that it is about to collapse ... Of course, one can approach the problem philosophically: a person has never flown, his brain does not understand the ingenious simplicity of the desire to fly at the level of intuition, and the principle "one who is born to crawl cannot fly" extends also to the lightness of evolutionary thought. And yet, the perfection of the aerodynamic design of the bird is fascinating, just like the birds themselves ... I don’t know about you, but I dreamed more than once on steam about how I would fly out the top floor window, fly over the trees ...

Needless to say, the issue of macroevolution is a sore subject in biology, and until it is closed, one can hardly expect an end to the reactionary chatter in this area. Unfortunately, even educated people often entertain themselves with self-deception, as if they understood everything according to Darwin, ignoring cognitive dissonance. So the origin of the theory nomogenesis- evolution based on the laws of Lev Semyonovich Berg (March 2 (15), 1876 - December 24, 1950) can hardly be considered random.

A man of encyclopedic knowledge, geographer, geologist, paleontologist, soil scientist, limnologist, ichthyologist, ethnographer, Berg outlined his views on evolution in the book Nomogenesis, or Evolution Based on Regularities (Petrograd, 1922), in which he completely opposed his teaching to Darwin. The evolutionary process according to Berg, unlike Darwin, is not accidental, but natural. The origin of species is polyphyletic - from many thousands of initial forms. Subsequently, evolution developed predominantly convergently. As in the case of a shark fish, an ichthyosaur reptile and a mammalian dolphin: in the aquatic environment they acquired the same streamlined shape with fins, despite the fact that the ancestors of some are tetrapods, others are originally aquatic animals. According to Berg, evolution is not a continuous appearance of new features, as in Darwin, but to a large extent - the deployment of already existing inclinations, like a plant from a bud inside a seed, in which leaves, stalk and root are already indicated. Evolution occurs abruptly, in jumps (saltations), simultaneously affecting huge masses of individuals over vast territories, on the basis of de Vries mutations. The species are sharply demarcated from one another, and no transitional forms exist. Natural selection and the struggle for existence are not factors of progress, they protect the norm.

In the work “The law of homological series in hereditary variability”, presented in the form of a report at the III All-Russian Breeding Congress in Saratov on June 4, 1920, Berg’s like-minded Vavilov introduced the concept of “homological series in hereditary variability”. Vavilov's law is formulated as follows: "Genetically close species and genera are characterized by similar series of hereditary variability with such regularity that, knowing the number of forms within one species, one can foresee the finding of parallel forms in other species and genera." The law of homologous series, as well as periodic system elements of D. I. Mendeleev in chemistry, makes it possible, on the basis of knowledge of the general laws of variability, to predict the existence in nature of previously unknown forms with traits valuable for selection. Thus, only multi-seeded fruits of sugar beet were previously known: the seeds grew together into a seed, a glomerulus, and during germination, extra seedlings had to be removed manually. However, specimens with single-seeded fruits have been found in wild beet species. Based on the knowledge of Vavilov's law, the researchers set out to search for one-seeded mutants in sugar beets as well; based on the discovered mutants, modern varieties of this crop were obtained. Also, Nikolai Vavilov owns the statement that "Selection is an evolution directed by the will of man."

The discovery of horizontal gene transfer (see mine) suggests that beneficial mutations can spread through viruses among taxonomically distant groups. Why, for example, is it not allowed that saber-toothed animals among various orders and even infraclasses of mammals appeared and died out conjugately, thus, it is not accidental. Also in favor of Berg's theory is the fact that the possible evolutionary directions are limited. Sometimes the appropriate enzymatic pathways simply do not exist, making it impossible, for example, for blue-furred mammals to emerge in the course of evolution.

A separate position, it should be noted, is occupied by the evolutionary ideas of I. A. Efremov. This researcher recognizes the progressive role of natural selection, but following Berg, he prefers convergence. According to Efremov, the higher energy level homeostasis(maintaining the constancy of the internal environment) in the organism, the narrower the range of possible evolutionary directions. Thus, according to Efremov, evolution is like a twisting spiral and has a pronounced finalistic character: it implies the ultimate higher goal - man. Efremov goes further and comes to the conclusion about the laws of the human form for other planets.

"There can be no premature intelligent life in lower forms like mold, and even more so - there can be no thinking ocean."

Nevertheless, Efremov was familiar with Berg's nomogenesis and it is not necessary to speak of convergence, or an accidental coincidence, as in the case of Darwin and Wallace.

Ivan Efremov

Unfortunately, finalism is a loophole for pushing theistic views into evolutionary theory, which is what V.I. Nazarov uses. If evolution has a goal, then there must be a creator, a demon of creationism - right there ...

It is also impossible not to dwell on the concept autoevolution cytogenetics Lima de Faria (1991). In short, Lima de Faria's evolution is based on the same patterns that cause water to freeze into a beautiful snowflake. And Lima de Faria cites in his book "Evolution without Selection" photographs of leaf-like pure bismuth in its native form and a plant leaf, ice crystals and young fern shoots ... Galaxies are compared to mollusk shells ... This is a modern form of nomogenesis. Self-organization of matter is studied synergy.

There have been other attempts to answer the question of how macroevolution was realized. For example, the theory of "hopeful monsters" (hopeful monsters) Goldschmidt (German: Richard Baruch-Benedikt Goldschmidt; April 12, 1878 - April 24, 1958).

The idea is simple. Macroevolutionary leaps are realized through the appearance of freaks, sharply anomalous forms, similar to Siamese twins, which in most cases have no chance of survival. But sometimes freaks are born hopeful... So the ugly, disproportionately large fold of skin in a flying squirrel could have arisen, but the question of how dinosaurs became birds still remains vague...

Theory symbiogenesis(a term first put forward by Merezhkovsky in 1905) is now practically beyond doubt among biologists. Cell organelles such as chloroplasts or mitochondria were once symbiont bacteria, that is, they existed on a mutually beneficial basis (this form of symbiosis is called mutualism) inside the ancestral eukarytic cell, and subsequently lost their independence, became its elements. There is strong evidence for this: mitochondria and plastids have two completely closed membranes. At the same time, the outer one is similar to the membranes of vacuoles, while the inner one is similar to bacteria. These organelles reproduce by division (sometimes they divide independently of cell division), they are never synthesized de novo. Own genetic material - circular DNA - like bacteria; have their own protein synthesis apparatus - ribosomes, and other evidence. Symbiogenesis is for us at least an example of one of the possible ways of mysterious macroevolution, and this is not a Darwinian way.

Yes, and hereditary information can be transmitted not only through nucleic acids, but also through proteins, for example, prions.

The review of evolutionary theories can go on for a very long time. Those interested can familiarize themselves, for example, with the book by V.I. Nazarov "Evolution not according to Darwin", being, of course, critical of what is written there. However, I will end this review here.

But back to the beginning of the article. Born in biology, modern evolutionism soon embraced all other natural sciences and became global. But, alas, the sphere of evolutionary theories continues to be an arena of class struggle. Darwin's theory, logical for the world of capitalist competition, unfortunately, often serves as a justification for the market struggle for existence, which is presented as a blessing and a source of progress. Of course, Darwin was the son of his time, he comprehended reality as a man of his own formation, but his tasks never included the birth of freaks like social Darwinism, strongly condemned by biologists all over the world, social Darwinism, which implies natural selection in human society. So the racists argued their anti-human views, they say the color of the skin is a Darwinian adaptation? On the contrary, in human society the role of natural selection is reduced to a minimum, and the level mutagenesis in connection with new technologies (for example, nuclear reactors) is increasing, which requires the rapid development of gene therapy methods. Trofim Lysenko played into the hands of modern liberals: their cries, full of crocodile tears, about what Academician Vavilov was repressed for, have not ceased to this day. The question of the advisability of considering non-Darwinian theories among schoolchildren remains open. Our education system is arranged in such a way that the latter do not have the possibility of deep immersion in the world of evolutionary theories, and Darwin in the mass consciousness is a symbol of evolutionary teaching; any criticism of Darwin can be misunderstood as an argument in favor of the gossip from the yellow papers, they say, Darwin was refuted, and man did not come from an ape.

Behind all this, Efremov’s dreams of meeting beauties from other planets are somehow lost, and the mysteries of prehistoric eras, such as the Cambrian explosion, and the ability of man as the king of nature to direct evolution in such a way as to save the biosphere from all pain ... Someday we understand what evolution is, finally. Someday we will see evolution on other planets, and there will be a revolution in our knowledge on this issue, because there will be something to compare with! Some day…

Literature:

1. Shakhnovich M. I. Myths about the creation of the world, M .: Knowledge, 1968
2. Charles Darwin. The origin of species through natural selection or the preservation of favored breeds in the struggle for life, M .: Education, 1987
3. Efremov I. A. Space and paleontology, M.: Knowledge, 1972
4. Nazarov V. I. Evolution not according to Darwin, M.: LKI, 2007

Term evolution(lat. evolutio - deployment) is widely used in various fields of science: the evolution of the Earth, society, methods of cognition. Biological evolution is an irreversible, directed historical development of wildlife, accompanied by a change in the genetic composition of populations, the formation of adaptations in organisms, the formation and extinction of species, the transformation of biogeocenoses and the biosphere as a whole. Evolutionary theory - the doctrine of the general patterns and driving forces of the historical development of living nature. The purpose of this doctrine is to identify the patterns of development of the organic world for the subsequent management of this process. The evolutionary doctrine solves the problem of understanding the general laws of evolution, the causes and mechanisms of the transformation of living things at all levels of its organization: molecular, subcellular, cellular, organ, organism, population, biogeocenotic, biospheric.

In the history of the development of the theory of evolution, several stages can be distinguished:
1. Pre-Darwinian period (until the middle of the 19th century): the works of C. Linnaeus, Lamarck, Roulier, and others.
2.Darwinian period (2nd half of the 19th century - 20s of the 20th century): the formation of classical Darwinism and the main anti-Darwinian trends in evolutionary thought.
3. The crisis of classical Darwinism (20s - 30s of the XX century), associated with the emergence of genetics and the transition to population thinking.
4. Formation and development of the synthetic theory of evolution (30s - 50s of the XX century).
5. Attempts to create a modern theory of evolution (60s - 90s of the XX century).

The origin of the idea of ​​the development of living things refers to the heyday of philosophical thought ancient east and Ancient Greece. By the second half of the 19th century, vast factual material on botany, zoology, and anatomy had been accumulated. There are ideas about the variability of species, which were supported by the rapid development of agriculture, the breeding of new breeds and varieties. A major contribution to the development of biology was made by C. Linnaeus, who proposed a classification system for animals and plants with the help of subordinate taxonomic groups. He introduced binary nomenclature (double species name). In 1808, in the work “Philosophy of Zoology” by J.B. Lamarck raises the question of the causes and mechanisms of evolutionary transformations, expounds the first time theory of evolution. The evolutionary theory of Lamarck, the creation of the cellular theory, the data of comparative anatomy, taxonomy, paleontology and embryology prepared the basis for creating the doctrine of the evolution of the organic world. Such a doctrine, which is the largest generalization of the natural sciences of the 19th century, was created by Charles Darwin (1809-1882). C. Darwin in 1859 published his main work “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection”, in which, using a huge amount of factual material, he showed the patterns of evolution of organisms, the animal origin of man.

The first to introduce students to the content of Darwin's teachings was Professor of St. Petersburg University S.S. Kutorga (lecture in 1860).

The main provisions of Darwin's theory:

1.Heredity and variability are the properties of organisms on which evolution is based. C. Darwin distinguished the following forms of variability: definite (according to modern concepts, non-hereditary or modificational variability) and indefinite (hereditary) variability. He attached the leading importance to evolution to the latter.
2. Natural selection is the driving, guiding factor of evolution. C. Darwin came to the conclusion about the inevitability in nature of the selective destruction of less adapted individuals and the reproduction of others. Natural selection in nature is carried out through the struggle for existence. Ch. Darwin distinguished between intraspecific, interspecific and struggle with factors of inanimate nature.
3. Based on the ideas about the origin of modern species through natural selection, the theory of evolution solves the problem of expediency, fitness in nature. Fitness is always relative. According to Ch. Darwin, the evolving unit is the species.
4. The diversity of species is considered as the result of natural selection and the associated divergence (divergence) of features.

Schematically, the essence of Charles Darwin's theory can be depicted as follows: the struggle for existence - natural selection - speciation. Ch. Darwin's theory has passed the test of time. Darwinism is a theory of the evolution of the organic world, based on the recognition of natural selection as the main driving force in the development of wildlife. Evolutionary theory is constantly evolving.

To explain the mechanisms of evolution at the first stages of the development of the theory, there was not enough knowledge of genetic laws. Genetics as a science arose in 1900. At that time, G. de Vries (Holland) proposed a mutational theory of evolution, according to which species are formed suddenly, as a result of mutations. At the same time, the role of natural selection as a factor in evolution was denied. Evidence, however, was gradually accumulating showing that genes are altered by the environment. In 1926, the work of S.S. Chetverikov “On some moments of the evolutionary process from the point of view of modern genetics”, which gave rise to the synthesis of genetics and classical Darwinism. Subsequently, the work of N.P. Dubinina, N.V. Timofeev-Resovsky, F.G. Dobzhansky et al. have shown that not only the appearance of new mutations, but also changes in the frequency of occurrence of a gene, which is determined by natural selection, play an important role in evolution. As a result of using the achievements of genetics for the analysis of natural selection, the doctrine of micro- and macroevolution arose. Microevolution is the changes that occur in the population (observed in nature and reproduced in the experiment). Microevolution is associated with changes in structural genes. Macroevolution is the processes occurring in systematic units that are above the species: the evolution of genera, families, orders, classes (they are judged by indirect data). Macroevolution is associated with changes in regulatory genes.

The main provisions of the synthetic theory of evolution:
1. The unit of evolution is a population, not a species, as Charles Darwin believed.
2. Elementary evolutionary material - mutations. They can accumulate in the general gene pool of a population, creating a huge reserve of the population's genetic potential.
3. An elementary evolutionary phenomenon - a change in the phenotypic composition of a population based on a change in the gene pool.
4. The elementary factors of evolution - the mutation process, natural selection, isolation, waves of life, genetic drift, i.e. random change in the genetic makeup of a population.

population- elementary unit of evolution. A population is a collection of individuals of a certain species, inhabiting a certain area for a long time, separated from other populations by isolation. All individuals of the population freely interbreed with each other (panmixia), giving fertile offspring. The population has morphophysiological, ecological and genetic characteristics.

The morphophysiological characteristic is the sum of the morphological and physiological characteristics of all individuals in the population. The ecological characteristics of a population include its size, size of the occupied territory, age and sex composition. The genetic characteristic includes the gene pool, reaction rate, genetic heterogeneity and genetic unity of the population, its polymorphism. The population is also characterized by the frequency of occurrence of genes and genotypes.

From the point of view of the synthetic theory of evolution, an elementary evolutionary phenomenon is a long-term directed change in the phenotypic composition of a population based on a change in its gene pool. It arises under the action of elementary evolutionary factors. The most important of them are: the mutation process, population waves, natural selection, isolation.

Life on Earth arose through physical and chemical reactions and evolved through a process of natural selection.

Before proceeding to a discussion of evolution, perhaps the most important concept in the life sciences, I would like to remind you of one thought expressed in the Introduction. The word "theory" in the scientific sense does not necessarily imply a lack of confidence in the concepts under consideration. Contrary to custom and the historical meaning of the word, many theories (including the theory of relativity) are actually among the most widely accepted parts of the scientific worldview.

At present, the reality of evolution is no longer questioned by any serious scientist, although there are several competing theories, each of which offers its own version of the development of events. In this respect, evolution is analogous to gravity. There are several theories of gravity - Newton's law of universal gravitation, general relativity and, one day, perhaps a universal theory. However, there is fact gravity - if you drop any object, it will fall. Similarly, there is the fact of evolution, despite the fact that the disputes of scientists on particular issues of theory continue.

If we discuss the history of life on Earth, then we should consider two stages, at each of which events were due to two different principles. At the first stage, the processes of chemical evolution on the most ancient Earth led to the formation of the first living cell from inorganic materials. At the second stage, the descendants of this living cell developed in different directions, giving rise to the diversity of life on the planet that we observe today. At this stage, development was determined by the principle of natural selection.

Chemical evolution

Human thought has only relatively recently been enriched with the idea that we can understand the process of organizing non-living materials, as a result of which simple living systems are formed. An important milestone on the way to this idea was the Miller-Urey experiment, staged in 1953, which for the first time showed the possibility of the emergence of basic biological molecules as a result of the most common chemical reactions. Since then, scientists have proposed many other ways in which chemical evolution could have taken place. Some of these ideas are listed below, but it is important to remember that there is still no consensus on which of these paths can be correct. One thing we know for sure: that one of these processes, or another process that no one has yet thought of, led to the emergence of the first living cell on the planet (unless life originated elsewhere - the idea of panspermia discussed in the Acids and bases chapter).

Primary broth. As a result of the processes reproduced in the Miller-Urey experiment, molecules were formed in the atmosphere that fell with rain into the ocean. Here (or perhaps in a tidal pool) an as yet unknown process led to the organization of these molecules, giving birth to the first cell.

RNA World. One of the problems of evolutionary theory is related to the development of a coding system based on the use of RNA molecules ( see also Central dogma of molecular biology). The problem is that proteins are encoded on DNA, but in order to read the written DNA code, protein activity is needed. Scientists have recently discovered that RNA, which is currently involved in converting the code written on DNA into proteins, may also perform one of the functions of proteins in living systems. It seems that the formation of RNA molecules was the most important event in the development of life on earth.

ocean path. Under conditions of enormous pressure prevailing at the bottom of the ocean, chemical compounds and chemical processes may not be the same as on the surface. Scientists are studying the chemistry of this environment, which may have contributed to the development of life. If the answer to this question is yes, then life could have originated at the bottom of the ocean and later migrated to land.

Autocatalytic complexes. This concept originates from the theory of complex self-regulating systems. According to this assumption, the chemism of life did not develop in steps, but arose at the stage of the primordial soup.

clay world. The first model of life may not have been chemical reactions, but static electrical charges on the surface of the clay covering the ocean floor. In this scheme, the complex molecules of life were assembled not by random combinations, but by electrons on the surface of the clay holding small molecules together as they were assembled into larger molecules.

As you can see, there is no shortage of ideas about how life could develop from inorganic materials. However, until the late 1990s, the origin of life was not a priority area of ​​​​science, and no one was particularly eager to deal with these theories. In 1997, NASA made origin of life research a top priority. I hope that soon scientists will be able to create in their laboratories simple organisms similar to those that could exist on our planet 4 billion years ago.

Natural selection

After the appearance on the planet of the first living organism capable of reproducing, life "switched the speed", and further changes were directed by natural selection. Most people use the term "evolution" to mean natural selection. The concept of natural selection was introduced by the English naturalist Charles Darwin, who published his monumental work in 1859. On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Breeds in the Struggle for Life. The idea of ​​natural selection, which Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) came to independently of Darwin, is based on two assumptions: 1) representatives of any species differ from each other in some way, and 2) there is always competition for resources. The first of these postulates is obvious to anyone who has observed any population (including human populations). Some representatives are larger, others run faster, the coloring of the third allows them to remain invisible against the background of their habitat. The second postulate reflects an unfortunate fact from the life of the natural world - many more organisms are born than survive, and thus there is a constant competition for resources.

Together, these postulates lead to an interesting conclusion. If some individuals have a feature that allows them to compete more successfully in a certain environment - for example, the developed musculature of predators allows them to hunt more successfully - then their chances of surviving to adulthood and leaving offspring increase. And their offspring are likely to inherit this feature. Using modern terminology, we say that individuals are highly likely to pass on genes responsible for fast running to their offspring. On the other hand, poor runners are less likely to survive and reproduce, so their genes may not pass on to the next generation. Therefore, in the generation of "children" there will be more individuals with "fast" genes than in the generation of "parents", and in the generation of "grandchildren" - even more. Thus, a trait that increases the likelihood of survival will eventually spread throughout the population.

This process Darwin and Wallace called natural selection. Darwin found in it a resemblance to artificial selection. Humans use artificial selection to breed plants and animals with desired traits by selecting mature individuals for this and only allowing them to cross. If humans can do this, Darwin reasoned, why can't nature? For the diversity of species that we see on the planet today, improved survival of individuals with adaptive traits over successive generations and over a long period of time is more than enough.

Darwin, a supporter of the doctrine of uniformitarianism, understood that the formation of new species should occur gradually - the differences between two populations should increase more and more, until interbreeding between them was not possible. Later, scientists drew attention to the fact that this pattern is not always observed. Instead, the view remains unchanged for a long time, then suddenly changes - this process is called intermittent equilibrium. Indeed, studying fossils, we see both options. speciation, which does not seem strange from the height of modern ideas about genetics. Now we understand the basis of the first of the two postulates listed: different versions of the same gene are recorded on the DNA of different individuals. A change in DNA can have completely different consequences: from a complete lack of effect (if the change affects a section of DNA that is not used by the body) to a huge effect (if the gene encoding a key protein is changed). Once a gene has changed, which may be gradual or immediate, natural selection will act either to propagate the gene throughout the population (if the change is beneficial) or to destroy it (if the change is harmful). In other words, the rate of change depends on the genes, but when such a change has already occurred, it is natural selection that determines the direction of change in the population.

Like any scientific theory, the theory of evolution had to be confirmed in life. There are three major classes of observations supporting this theory.

fossil evidence

After the death of a plant or animal, the remains usually disperse into the environment. But sometimes some of them can sink into the soil, for example, into silt during a flood, and be inaccessible to decomposition. Over time, as the silt turns into rock ( cm. Rock transformation cycle) slow chemical processes will replace calcium in the skeleton or other hard parts of the body with minerals contained in the surrounding rock. (On rare occasions, conditions are such that softer structures such as skin or feathers may be preserved.) In the end, this process will culminate in the formation of a perfect imprint of the original body part in the stone - the fossil. All discovered fossils are collectively referred to as fossil evidence.

The age of the fossils is approximately 3.5 billion years - so many years old prints found in the former mud deposits on ancient Australian rocks. They tell a compelling story about the gradual increase in complexity and diversity that has led to the vast diversity of life forms that inhabit the Earth today. For most of the past, life was relatively simple, represented by single-celled organisms. Approximately 800 million years ago, multicellular life forms began to appear. Since their body was soft (think of a jellyfish), there were almost no prints left of them, and only a few decades ago, scientists were convinced that they lived in that era, based on prints left in sedimentary deposits. Approximately 550 million years ago, hard covers and skeletons appeared, and it is from this moment that real fossils appear. Fish - the first vertebrates, appeared about 300 million years ago, dinosaurs began to die out about 65 million years ago ( cm. Mass extinctions), and 4 million years ago, fossil humans appeared in Africa. All of these events can be read in the Fossil Chronicle.

Biochemical evidence

All living organisms on our planet have the same genetic code - we are all nothing more than a set of different information written down universal language DNA. Then we can expect that if life developed according to the scenario described above, then in modern living organisms the degree of coincidence of DNA sequences should be different, depending on how long ago their common ancestor lived. For example, humans and chimpanzees should have more DNA sequences than humans and fish, since the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived 8 million years ago, and the common ancestor of humans and fish hundreds of millions of years ago. Indeed, by analyzing the DNA of living organisms, we find confirmation of this assumption: the farther apart on the evolutionary tree two organisms are, the less similarity is found in their DNA. And this is quite understandable, since the more time has passed, the more differences have accumulated among them.

The use of DNA analysis to open our eyes to our evolutionary past is sometimes referred to as the molecular clock. This is the most convincing proof of the theory of evolution. Human DNA is closer to chimpanzee DNA than to fish DNA. It could have been quite the opposite, but it didn't. In the language of the philosophy of science, this fact shows that the theory of evolution refutable- one can imagine an outcome that would point to the falsity of this theory. Thus, evolution is not a so-called creationist teaching, as if based on the biblical Book of Genesis, since there are no such observations or experiments that could tangibly convince creationists that their teaching is false.

Imperfect Design

While imperfect design is not, as such, an argument for evolution, it is perfectly consistent with Darwin's picture of life and contradicts the notion that living beings were created already having a specific purpose in life. The fact is that in order to pass on genes to the next generation, the body does not need to be perfect, but only good enough to successfully resist enemies. Therefore, each rung on the evolutionary ladder must be built on top of the previous one, and the characteristics that might have been favorable at one of the stages will be “frozen” and will be preserved even after more suitable options appear.

Engineers call this feature the QWERTY effect (QWERTY is a sequence of letters on the top row of almost all modern keyboards). When the first keyboards were designed, the main goal was to reduce typing speed and prevent mechanical typewriter keys from jamming. This keyboard design has survived to this day, despite the possibility of using productive keyboards.

Likewise, structural features are "fixed" in the early stages of evolution and are retained in their former form, despite the fact that any modern engineering student would have coped with this task better. Here are some examples.

The human eye is designed in such a way that incident light is converted into nerve impulses in front of the retina, although not all of the incident light enters the eye in this way.

The green color of the leaves of plants means that they reflect part of the light falling on them. Any engineer knows that the solar receiver must be black.

Deep underground caves are inhabited by snakes with eye sockets under the skin. This makes sense if the ancestors of these snakes lived on the surface and needed eyes, but it makes no sense for animals created for underground life.

In the body of whales there are small bones of the hind limbs. Today, these bones are completely useless, but their origin is understandable if the ancestors of whales once lived on land.

It is not known what function the appendix serves in humans, although in some herbivores the appendix is ​​involved in the digestion of grass.

These evidences complement each other and are so grandiose that not only long ago convinced serious scientists of the validity of Darwin's evolutionary theory, but they are also the core of any explanations regarding the functioning of living systems on our planet.

See also:

Darwin's finches

The diversity of finches in the Galapagos Islands is one of the clearest examples of natural selection in action. Darwin's theory of evolution was based strictly on observations of nature. Traveling as a naturalist on the Beagle, Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands, one of the most remote areas on Earth. Finches make up about 40% of all bird species living on these islands. Apparently, they are descended from one species of finches that flew to the islands many years ago. Darwin noticed that as a result of evolution, finches occupied completely different ecological niches. The ancestor of the Galapagos finches was a bird that lived on the ground and fed on seeds. The modern descendants of this finches include birds that live on the ground and in trees, feeding on seeds, cacti, and insects. It is believed that this diversity among closely related birds prompted Darwin's idea of ​​natural selection. That is why Darwin's finches have become one of the symbols in the history of science.

birch moth

According to the theory of evolution, the characteristics of a population change in response to changes in the environment, with preference given to characteristics that increase the chances of a living organism to produce offspring. One of the best studies of natural selection in action is on the moth moth ( Biston betularia). These butterflies, which live in England, most often settle on trees covered with lichen. In this part of England, light lichen grows, and butterflies that merge in color with lichen are less visible to predators.

In the 19th century, industry rapidly developed in Central England, and much of the birch moth's range was heavily polluted with smoke and soot. The trunks of the trees turned black, which greatly changed the habitat of the moth. The moth population began to change, and in the polluted areas, butterflies with a dark color were in a more advantageous position. Eventually, the entire population became black. This change occurred exactly as the theory of evolution predicted - in the changed environment, a few dark butterflies gained an incredible competitive advantage, and gradually their genes began to dominate

The explanation of changes in the birch moth population, like any other scientific hypothesis, had to be confirmed experimentally. Such an experimenter was the amateur entomologist Henry Bernard David Kettlewell (1907-79), who conducted his research in the 1950s. He marked the undersides of moth butterflies invisible to predators. He then released one group of tagged light and dark butterflies near Birmingham, in the most heavily polluted area, and a second group in rural Dorset, a relatively unpolluted area in southwest England. After that, Kettlewell visited these areas at night, and turning on the light to attract butterflies, he collected them again. He found that in Birmingham, he managed to collect 40% dark butterflies and 20% light butterflies, and in Dorset - 6% dark and 12% light butterflies. In the polluted area of ​​Birmingham, the survival of the butterflies was obviously favored by dark coloration, while in the clean area of ​​Dorset, light coloration was favored.

The story of the birch moth did not end there. Beginning in the 1960s, air pollution began to be tackled in England, and soot accumulations in industrial areas began to decline. In response to this, the birch moth population began to change color from dark to light, which, again, could be predicted based on the provisions of Darwin's theory.

Charles Robert Darwin, 1809-82

English naturalist, creator of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin completely changed the idea of ​​nature. He was born in Shrewsbury, in a famous family in the city. Darwin's father was a successful doctor, and his mother came from the Wedgwood family, famous for its pottery. Darwin was an inconspicuous student because he believed school education boring and dry. The principal of the school was unhappy that Darwin was wasting time on chemical experiments, and the father, once again bringing down a hail of reproaches on his son, said: “You are only interested in hunting, dogs and catching rats, and you will bring disgrace on yourself and your whole family” .

Darwin was sent to Edinburgh to study medicine, but it was tormenting for him to be present at the operations (which were then performed without anesthesia). He then studied at Cambridge, preparing to become a priest. There he met people who instilled in him an interest in geology and natural history, and later agreed that he would be taken to the Beagle sailing ship (as an unpaid naturalist), which went on a five-year exploration voyage around South America and Australia. . It was on this voyage that Darwin made observations of finches that led him to develop the theory of evolution.

After returning to England, Darwin married a cousin, but soon fell ill. This disease, caused by insect stings in Argentina, is called American trypanosomiasis by modern scientists. In retirement, Darwin found that he had plenty of free time to reflect on his observations, and was full of samples collected by him and other members of the expedition. He began to question the conventional wisdom about the immutability of plant and animal species, and gradually came to believe that a system in which species evolve over time in response to changes in the environment was a much better explanation of the natural world. On the Origin of Species was published in 1859 and immediately caused a storm. Some considered the main tenet of Darwin's theory to be a critique of Christian doctrine (a view that persists today), and controversy over Darwinism raged for most of the second half of the 19th century.

Today, the idea of ​​the development of life in the process of evolution, which is directed by the forces of natural selection, is a general idea that connects all the sciences of life, from ecology to molecular biology.

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"These evidence complement each other and are so grandiose that they not only convinced serious scientists of the validity of Darwin's evolutionary theory a long time ago, but are also the core of any explanations regarding the functioning of living systems on our planet."

But it seems to me that serious scientists have long begun to question the theory of evolution. Some of Darwin's ideas have their place. But not all. And even more so, this theory cannot be elevated to the rank of proven and irrefutable. Darwin never told us how this very first cell (the simplest) appeared, from which everything else developed. According to the cell theory (described on the same site), a cell can only arise from another cell, i.e. living things can only come from living things. So let's still teach and present Darwin's theory as a THEORY, HYPOTHESIS, but not as an irrefutable given. In light of the knowledge of modern science and Einstein's theory of relativity, even Newton's falling apple doesn't really fall. It falls for the person who looks at it, but not on the scale of the Universe.

To answer

So I wonder why the vast majority of people who talk about Darwinism at a non-professional level constantly confuse evolutionary theory with the theory of the origin of life on Earth ... Apparently, victims of education. Darwin developed a theory that explained the DEVELOPMENT of life on Earth (to a much better extent, the synthetic theory of evolution, created by the fusion of mutation theory and the theory of classical selectivism - Darwinism, copes with this function), but not its emergence.
The VZHNZ theory is already a logical continuation of neo-Darwinism for times when life is not fixed on our planet. But that's a completely different theory. And even if it turns out that our ideas about the abiogenic VZHNZ are erroneous, this will not affect neo-Darwinism in any way, especially since it is supported by a huge amount of factual material and, at the present stage of development, it is by no means a hypothesis, but a full-fledged theory!

To answer

> it is important to remember that there is still no consensus on whether
> which of these paths can be correct.
> One thing we know for sure: that one of these processes or
> another process that no one has thought of yet,
> led to the first living cell on the planet

Citizens, well, you can’t write like that. Like, no one knows how it happened, but we know for sure --- it was a process of chemical evolution or some other miraculous process that no one has thought of yet. Well, it's just funny from such high-profile phrases that are not supported by anything.
Or someone has already provided an adequate model for the origin of life on earth, by chem. evolution? No. So why were the words "One thing we know for sure" uttered?
You can't write articles like that!

Further. Miller's work.
In general, I am surprised that someone else quotes and recalls Miller's experiments. No, I do not call for disrespect for these works, but forgive the most complex molecules that Miller received during the experiment consisted of 20 atoms. The experiment clearly shows the boundary of the complexity of connections, which cannot be large. What to do next with this pot-bellied trifle?

About later experiments.
Everyone understands that in 100 or 200 years it will be possible to synthesize an elephant in a test tube. But these will be the possibilities of the creator (technology + a whole group of scientists that directs the process of synthesis), and not abiogenesis. Abiogenesis requires adequate(!) modeling of the process of life origin, which has not yet been provided. A good chemist understands at first glance that abiogenesis is nonsense that lives only in the stories of popularizers of science and has no serious chemical justification at all.

Eraser!
I almost fell off my chair when I read your "The possibility of the emergence of living things from non-living things is quite convincingly proved by the same experiments of Miller." Happy New Year!

My personal opinion --- science has lost objectivity. In matters of the origin of life, it is NOT possible to be so biased and one-sided.
I will give a few examples.

Example "A":
During archaeological excavations, various objects are found, for example, knives. No one has any idea that these knives were formed as a result of chem. evolution? This idea is not even prompted by the similarity of the material from which the knives are made. Scientists believe that this is a product of intellectual labor.
Correct logical sequence:
we do not see the carrier of intelligence, but everyone is sure that knives have an intellectual origin.

Example "B":
During archaeological excavations, fossilized bones of some unknown animal are found. Hmm, it turns out that this was once the most complex biological "machine", which instead of iron has the most complex cells, complete autonomy, etc.
The biological "machine" is millions and millions of times more complex than the organization of matter than knives or modern robots.

But it turns out that there are many (!) people who admit that such super-complex biological creations can be formed only through self-organization and subsequent evolution.

To answer

• You can write like this. There are the following reasons for that.

  1. The theory of chemical evolution, leading to the emergence of life, is today the only _natural-science_ hypothesis. There are simply no others.

  2. It does not have direct contradictions with the known laws of nature and firmly established facts.

  3. It provides a good basis for developing testable hypotheses and sets a clear direction for scientific inquiry.

  Yes, of course, there is no exhaustive theory of the origin of life today. But this is a fairly natural state of affairs for science. If everything were reliably established and proven, then there would be nothing to investigate. Of course, over time, new ideas about the origin of life may appear that will be more successful than today's ideas about chemical evolution. But as long as these ideas do not exist, the only scientific approach is to study the possibilities of chemical evolution.

  Your comment may give the impression that you are sympathetic to the so-called "intelligent design theory". The only problem is that it is not scientific. If the external factor is natural (for example, aliens), the question of the origin of life is simply transferred to an earlier point in time, but is not resolved in any way. Moreover, there are no sufficient grounds for such a transfer. If the external factor is supernatural, we simply go beyond the scope of science and begin to engage in mysticism.

  But perhaps more importantly, the "intelligent design theory" does not allow for the formation of any systematic research program. And without such a program, the theory cannot claim scientific status.

  And finally, most experts now adhere to evolutionary views. Science is what scientists do. Most of them know much more in their field than amateurs. And that's why their judgments are trustworthy. In addition, there is a rather tough competition in the scientific environment. If a viable alternative theory appeared, it would certainly win a fairly large number of supporters among specialized scientists. This has happened more than once in various fields of science. The fact that this did not happen in the theory of the origin of life is simply due to the fact that no one has yet offered worthy alternatives.

  As for the complexity of living organisms and its origin, then, I think, the argument about the impossibility of the emergence complex systems natural way has no basis other than everyday everyday experience. But science has repeatedly shown that this experience very often fails outside the area in which it is acquired (and in Everyday life also often fails). Remember that moving at a constant speed does not require the application of force, remember the relativistic addition of velocities, remember how an electron passes through two holes at once - all this is in direct contradiction with everyday experience, but, nevertheless, these are firmly established facts. Apparently, the idea that the complex cannot arise without a creator is the same common sense illusion associated with the fact that in everyday life we ​​never have to deal with such scales of time and number of complex systems as in the case of the evolution of the biosphere (or protobiosphere).

  To answer

  • > 1. The theory of chemical evolution leading to the emergence of life,
    >

    Listen, we're not talking in the sandbox, are we?
    When you say chem. evolution leads to the emergence of life, it seems to me that you know how it happened :)
    In other words, you forgot to provide a link to an adequate simulation of the process of the origin of life (until they do, chemical evolution --- scientific fiction. No more.) Be so kind...

    > is today the only _natural-scientific_ hypothesis.

    Agree. It turns out that in some scientific circles it is fashionable to look like an ostrich, to hide one's head in the sand, to deny facts that can affect the worldview of mankind, to adhere to methodological natural science, to translate issues of cardinal importance into the plane of humor ... etc. That's all something that many scientists have learned well!

    > 2. It does not have direct contradictions with known
    > laws of nature and firmly established facts.

    Of course it doesn't contradict. It simply does not have scientific evidence, if so far no one can offer a working model of the (self-)genesis of life.
    Studying science fiction does not contradict the known laws of nature and firmly established facts.

    > Your comment may give the impression that
    > as if you are sympathetic to the so-called "reasonable plan".

    I for objectivity and sympathy have nothing to do with it. By the way, you did not comment on my examples of archaeological finds. If it's not difficult, be so kind... Where do legs grow from such alogism?

    > The only trouble is that it is not scientific.

    Those. a biochemist who artificially synthesizes life in a test tube is not engaged in science? Why is creation not scientific?

    > If the external factor is supernatural, we just go out
    > beyond the scope of science and begin to engage in mysticism.

    Chem. evolution also goes beyond the supernatural (there is still no working model), only in this place for some reason you do not say that "they are engaged in mysticism". Weird.

    > And finally, most specialists now
    > adheres to evolutionary views.

    To answer

It is not entirely clear what exactly you are against: against the theory of evolution, against the theory of self-organization, or against both theories at the same time? Let's say that robots fit perfectly into the theory of evolution. After all, it is quite possible that in the not very distant future, robots will themselves design and produce new, more advanced models of robots.

>No, I do not call for disrespect for these works, but forgive the most complex molecules that Miller received during the experiment consisted of 20 atoms. The experiment clearly shows the boundary of the complexity of connections, which cannot be large.

The experiment clearly showed the boundary of the complexity of connections under specifically given initial conditions. But many more factors could influence, we are simply not able to go through all the options, but this is quite within the power of the galaxy because of its huge size and, consequently, a huge number of options for the initial conditions. Maybe for the further self-organization of these 20 atomic compounds into more complex molecules, you need at the same time huge pressure, a strong magnetic field, and something else?

To answer

To say that "The theory of evolution, within the framework of its applicability, is fully proven and irrefutable" is premature.
I am not an expert, but as far as I know, no one has yet presented the world with an example of a mutation that would lead to the formation of a new species. All mutations result only in intraspecific changes, such as feather color or nose length. A theory is only workable when it is supported by real examples, and not abstract conclusions based only on the external similarity of all living organisms.

And as for the spontaneous emergence of life - this is the most crazy faith.
Everyone must have heard about the monkey that prints "War and Peace".
But have any of you thought about how unfortunate this example is for promoting evolutionism?
For those who are not too lazy to creak their brains (who have them), I propose to recall arithmetic.
It is believed that if the monkey is given enough time, it will be able to type intelligent text by randomly poking at the keys.

Do we have this time at our disposal?

Scientists estimate the age of the universe at 20 billion years. years, according to recent data, even less. Let's see if this time is enough.
Let's take this post of mine as an example. Of course, it is a little less than "War and Peace", but let it be a head start for the Darwinists.
There are about 1700 letters in this post without punctuation marks. There are 32 letters in Russian (not counting the mysterious letter Yo). Upper case will not be considered either. Total what we have. The probability of hitting one letter = 1/32, and 1700 letters respectively =(1/32)^1700 or approximately 1.8/10^2559 (i.e. 1.8E-2559).
Now let's count the number of posts that the monkey will have time to print for T=20bn. years, i.e. for T=6.3x10^17 sec.
Let's say the monkey prints at a speed of F = 10 ^ 6 (million) posts per second (what a trifle).
And don't let her work alone. Let's plant a monkey for every square millimeter of the Earth's surface.
The area of ​​the ball is S=4p(R^2). The radius of the Earth is approximately R = 6000 km, therefore the surface area = 4.5x10^8 sq. km or 4.5x10^20 sq. mm. Total N = 4.5x10 ^ 20 monkeys that will print:
TxFxN=2.85x10^44 posts.
Even is not enough. Well, okay, let's do this. We will plant this whole crazy monkey on every star in the universe. According to various estimates, there are about 10^20 galaxies in the entire visible universe. Each galaxy has about the same number of stars = 10^20.
In total, we have only 10 ^ 40 stars at our disposal. We get a total of 2.85x10^84 posts. Multiply by our probability and we get approximately 1/10^2475 (i.e. 1E-2475).
What is this, low probability? Or very small?
No, it's not just a very, very small probability, it's a ZERO probability.
Now tell me, is there more or less information in the simplest DNA of the most primitive organism than in this post?

P.S. And I am completely silent about RNA and the chiral purity of living structures.

To answer

• There are no individual mutations leading to the formation of a new species. Species are formed differently. It all starts with the division of a single population into groups of individuals that do not interbreed with each other. Usually the reason is the geographical division of habitats. But recently, a number of examples of behavioral separation have been found, when several groups of individuals of the same species live in the same territory, but do not remain reproductively isolated.

  In such separated populations there is a process of accumulation of genetic changes. Moreover, in the first place, these are not even mutations, but changes in the regulation of genes (see. If the separation lasts long enough, then the groups become reproductively incompatible, that is, even if you try to cross, representatives of the two groups, they are already unable to give fertile offspring This means that a new species has formed, or, more precisely, two one species has split into two.

  As for your calculations of the probability of the emergence of life, it is also very outdated. No one assumes that life was formed due to the random combination of atoms into molecules. Most likely, this process of self-organization was quite natural, although individual details could be determined by random factors. I recommend that you look at the article by Acad. V. Parmon "Natural selection among molecules (http://macroevolution.narod.ru/npr_snytnikov.pdf). It describes in some detail how such processes could proceed. Of course, unlike the theory of speciation, this is still really a hypothesis. But it looks quite convincing and shows that the scientific search for ways of the origin of life is quite possible.

  By the way, there are a lot of completely wrong numbers in your calculations. There are 10^20 galaxies in the visible part of the Universe, and approximately 10^12, stars in the average galaxy are approximately 10^11. The age of the Universe is not 20, but about 14 billion years. Why am I? Moreover, scientific conclusions require some accuracy, both in numbers and in the formulation of statements.

  You have absolutely convincingly proved that one specific, predetermined DNA molecule cannot, by pure chance, assemble itself from nucleotides. With this, by the way, no one argues. But you mistakenly identify this statement with the statement about the impossibility of the appearance of life in the course of natural processes. After all, the whole variety of natural processes is far from being reduced to a random combination of nucleotides.

  Consideration from chance does not make sense also because the problem is not at all in obtaining some complex molecule once, but in isolating this "useful" molecule from trillions of "useless" ones. If you basically have such a mechanism, then it certainly works not randomly, but in a natural way. And if there are such processes, then why assume randomness at an early stage? Perhaps it would be better to look for a pattern there as well?

  (And I’ll also note in parentheses that even within the framework of your “random” consideration, life is not reduced to one single DNA molecule - there may be a huge number of quite “workable” variants. What is their proportion among all possible rearrangements of nucleotides is unknown, and it is quite possible that it quite large).

  To answer

  • At the expense of "workable" options, I agree, I did not take into account their share, but in order for the probability to be at least somehow sane, their share must be truly huge. And as a programmer, it's hard for me to imagine that. Agree that if you take any program, for example, Quake (or something to your taste) and try to change the code of this program without the help of programmers, then there will be several options: either something purely externally changes (for example, the color of a pixel), or it will become buggy, or she will die forever. It is obvious and not necessary for any person to provide evidence that we will not get Quake II and then Quake III, not to mention Microsoft Office :-) and time will not save us.
    

    And your phrase "... the process of self-organization was quite natural ..." I really liked it, a strong move :-)

    But by and large, our dialogue looks like this:

    A Creacinist (K) and an Evolutionist (E) are walking down the path.
    K. -Look, someone has lost his watch!
    E. - This is not a watch, it is a piece of metal that looks like a watch.
    K picks up the watch and examines it.
    K. - And here is the inscription "Made in Japan".
    E. - This is not an inscription, but a scratch that looks like the inscription "Made in Japan".
    K. - What are you talking about, there are no such pure materials in nature.
    E. - And this is a meteorite. Iron. And here is not glass but a bubble of frozen quartz. And from hitting the ground, the spring was compressed and therefore they are ticking.
    K. - What kind of spring? ...!
    
    K. -...8(!!!

    To answer

    • > At the expense of "workable" options, I agree, I did not take into account their share, ...

      This is just the least significant remark. I did it only to emphasize the sloppiness in reasoning.

      > And for me, as a programmer, it's hard to imagine.

      And here is the root of the error. You are a programmer (by the way, I am also in the past) and you transfer the experience gained in your narrow field of professional activity to completely different issues. Well, vyv Such a mistake is made by a lot of people - "Is it possible that in France even cabbies speak French ?!" :)

      > Agree that if you take any program...

      Let's continue your analogy. Let's take some biocenosis and roughly intervene in its work. Let's kill, say, a quarter of the population of some unfortunate animals and burn half the forest with fire. What will happen next? But nothing special. It will take 10-20-40 years and everything will be restored. Well, maybe some other animals will breed, and in the place of the former burnt area there will be a slightly different ratio of tree species. And what will happen to Quake if half of the memory is filled with garbage? Maybe a new breed of monsters will be bred? :-)

      > As for the stars, I will not argue all the more that you have corrected the numbers down. :-)

      I corrected them in the right direction :) Because I care about how it all really is, and not upholding certain beliefs by themselves.

      > And your phrase "... the process of self-organization was quite natural ..."
      > I really liked it, a strong move :-)
      > ...
      > E. -Which accidentally formed inside!

      Here, look, again you have a puncture in logic. I say that the processes of development of life are natural, and you again attribute to evolutionists talk about chance. Evolutionists rely no more on chance than physicists do on describing the properties of an ideal gas. Evolution is a natural, not a random process. Many of its features are already understood today, but many remain to be studied.

      To make it clearer, here's another example. Take the atoms in a crystal. They spontaneously line up in a strict order. It is not always possible for a person to manually create such a clear order. Why aren't we surprised? Because at school they explained something on their fingers about
      crystal lattice. But after all, we were not explained why it arises. Of course, if you read serious books on quantum mechanics, then some hint of understanding will arise? But still it will not be absolute clarity, because. only simplified special cases are considered in the books. Calculations of real crystals are monstrously complicated. Nevertheless, crystals do exist, they form quite naturally, and every winter thousands of tons fall on us from the sky. And nobody needs a grandfather on a cloud to make hexagonal snowflakes.

      The same is true of biological processes. Only they are more complicated than a crystal or a watch. On living creatures, unlike the mentioned Japanese watches, it does not have "Made in Eden" written on it. (This was written by people in a completely different place.) And the fact that the processes of life are complex and not yet fully understood does not mean at all that they could not develop naturally.

      To answer

      • >"the analogy with programs is simply fundamentally wrong"
        Let me disagree with you. The DNA molecule can even be compared to a program. And replacing the defective genes will not lead to anything good, as in the case of replacing a couple of bytes in the program (if this replacement was not made by the programmer).
        And as for the biocenosis, then here you are already sloppy - there will be no OTHER animals. There will be the same or, if no one survived, coming from a nearby forest. And new ones will not appear from the ashes. :-)

        By the way, the evolution of programs resembles the evolution of animals. And if the programs were alive, then they would certainly come up with the theory of evolution. And among them, for sure, there would be those who do not believe in programmers. :-))

        To answer

        • You know, you can compare God's gift with scrambled eggs. And some even think that they are the same thing :)

          Replacing individual nucleotides in the genetic code, as a rule, does not lead to anything bad (although there are exceptions). In people (normal, healthy) today, several million single-nucleotide polymorphisms have been found, that is, differences in the genetic code in one letter (for more details, see. Nothing, all these people live and reproduce. These differences can be used to determine the origin of people. Most of these mutations do not affect the body in any way.Some are harmful, others are beneficial.

          There is, for example, a mutation found in some African tribes that causes what is known as sickle cell anemia. Just one nucleotide is out of place, and red blood cells change shape and carry less oxygen. It would seem that such a mutation should be destroyed by natural selection. However, its carriers appear to be immune to malaria. In Africa, this is a very important advantage. Therefore, this gene has been preserved there, while in other countries it is much less common.

          Dig a little bit into what biologists, geneticists and evolutionists write. They are a little deeper, they understand the structure of life than programmers and theologians. At least they are studying this life in the field and in the laboratory, rather than talking about it. I recommend the site http://macroevolution.narod.ru. It has a very good collection of materials.

          And you just didn’t think enough about the biocenosis example. New plants will emerge from the ashes. Because this ash is a breeding ground for seeds to germinate. And by eating plants, animals will also reproduce. And after a while, the biocenosis will recover naturally. Programs are not capable of anything like that. This is the fundamental difference between the living and the non-living: life is able to organize non-living matter.

          The evolution of technology is indeed somewhat reminiscent of the evolution of life. Stanislav Lem drew attention to this. And this is no coincidence. The principle of evolution is the same in both cases: the search for free ecological niches, competition for resources, specialization, and so on. In both cases, natural selection works - unsuccessful or insufficiently flexible devices and programs die, and those that can adapt to changing conditions survive.

          And it should also be noted that in both cases no one personally controls this evolution. An individual or a company can create a new device, but its success is determined not by the creator, but by the market, that is, the environment that cannot be completely controlled even in totalitarian countries. And, by the way, to the extent that the unfortunate demiurges still take control of the market, the development of technology, its evolution is hampered. Remember what happened to household appliances and the automotive industry in the USSR.

          There is no "reasonable plan" either in the development of technology or in the development of life. There is a self-consistent process of mutual adaptation of the participants in evolution. However, there is one important difference between the evolution of life and the evolution of technology - they have a different mechanism of variability.

          In the case of life, variability is realized through the enumeration of various mutations (and, more importantly, through changes in the regulation of gene activity, see. Most mutations do not have any effect on a living organism (although they can appear in distant descendants). Some cite to death, and some (very few) are successful, reproduced many times in descendants and become a step in microevolution.

          In engineering, variability is realized by adjusting the intervention of engineers. Their interventions are more targeted than the blind pokes of evolution. But, nevertheless, one should not underestimate what a huge amount of trial and error engineers make in the process of developing a device. Each test of a new modification of a device or program corresponds to several evolutionary trials.

          For engineers, one test takes from a few seconds to several months. And in nature, each test takes from several months to hundreds of thousands of years. Therefore, engineers, thanks to the existence of the mind, carry out the evolution of technology millions of times faster than life evolves.

          It took several billion years for life to create a variety of species. And engineers have been working for only a few centuries and have already created an equally diverse variety of technical devices. Some of these devices are far superior to the creations of living evolution, but not yet in all respects.

          Actually, the very mind of engineers turned out to be an adaptive element of evolution, which brought it to a new stage. In total, evolution has five fundamentally different stages:

          1. Cosmological, on which matter developed solely under the influence of the laws of physics.
          2. Chemical, where all the same physical laws created the conditions for the selection of molecules capable of self-reproduction.
          3. Biological, in which self-reproducing molecules begin to compete in organizing the environment in their "interests", keeping successful developments in genetic memory.
          4. Social, on which self-consciousness and the ability to transfer knowledge from one creature to another appear, bypassing the slowly changing genetic code (many higher animals have the beginnings of a social level).
          5. Scientific (engineering), on which writing appears as a way to store and process knowledge about the world, regardless of the subject.

          The key mechanisms of each next level are created at the previous level in a natural way. But as soon as they appear, evolution accelerates dramatically. You see the problem in the fact that the evolution of technology takes place with the participation of man and his mind, while the evolution of life does without them. But actually there is no problem here. For the absence of intelligence, the evolution of life pays with extreme slowness.

          The mind is a colossal accelerator of evolution, but it is not its engine. This is a very important thesis. Hold on to it. The human mind, as a rule, cannot determine on its own what programs or devices it should create. In his choice, he relies on an analysis of the state of society and the market, looking for unoccupied niches and technologies available for their development. At the same time, it pursues the goal of ensuring its existence and prosperity in the existing social conditions. That is, it is these conditions (environment) and the desire to adapt to them that are the engine of technical evolution, and not the mind itself. If some alternatively gifted person invents something that society does not need at all, his ideas will not be recognized, and his efforts will be in vain. And it is unlikely that he will have many followers, unlike those who "hit the stream" and achieved success.

          So do not confuse the cart with the horse: the mind is a product of evolution, not evolution is a product of the mind.

          To answer

    >Why this argument? To the fact that your analogy between life and programs is wrong. Life without any intervention of the "programmer" heals very severe damage, which programs are generally not capable of. Doesn't it follow from this that life is organized in principle differently than programs and the analogy with programs is simply fundamentally wrong?

    "Life" heals only those injuries, the ability to heal which is present initially. The analogy for the example with the program is given incorrectly. Your "analogy" to the following situation. There is a program that copies itself wherever it finds such an opportunity (we know such programs, right?). We erased copies of this program from some of the physical media, but did not restrict access to other copies there, in order to copy themselves. What happens after a while with the cleared disk space? It will be refilled with copies of the program.

    To answer

Take 2: The rate of speciation.
I was advised to count, so I did. You can try to estimate the rate of speciation from the number of species that we have today and the time that evolution had at its disposal. Over time, I acted simply - I took it to the maximum so that the rate of speciation did not turn out to be too high. Namely - 5 billion years, i.e. upper estimate of the age of the earth. This figure can only be reduced, there is nowhere to increase it, especially since I did not leave any time for the emergence of life. There is a problem with the number of species - the range of estimates by scientists of the total volume of biota varies greatly, ranging from 5 to 80 million. To get the LOWER estimate of the rate of speciation, we take 5 million. For a rough estimate, these two numbers should be enough. From the fact that the process of speciation is proportional to the number of species, the dynamics will be exponential. Someone may object and say that speciation did not proceed continuously, but spasmodically, but even in this case one can estimate the speed. Only an additional parameter is needed - the number of speciation jumps. So, by simple manipulations we get the formula: N=exp(k*T).
k=3.1E-09.
N - number of species
T - time in years
It can be seen that at time T=0 (beginning of evolution) N=1, i.e. one ancestor (but you can count with more than one).
And at the moment T=5.0E+09 (5 billion years, i.e. now) N=5.4E+06, i.e. approximately 5 million species (as intended).


It's real?

To answer

• Now that's an interesting conversation. Yes, I think that such an assessment is quite realistic. Moreover, the actual rate of speciation is likely to be much higher. I propose a counter approach. Let's try to limit the rate of speciation from above: at what rate would this process be completely obvious to most scientists?

  Now scientists know about 10 ^ 6 species of multicellular organisms. Most of them have been scientifically described in the last two centuries. That is, the average rate of description of new (newly discovered) species is about 5 thousand species per year (most of them are insects). At this rate, it is absolutely impossible to directly notice the appearance of two new species in a century. In order to be able to talk about direct observation of speciation, it must proceed at a rate of hundreds, if not thousands, of new species per year. So the estimate of 2 species per century does not contradict the observations.

  And here is another estimate from above. It was made on the basis of a very authoritative document on environmental protection and biodiversity conservation: http://www.undp.kz/library_of_publications/files/818-27659.p df. On page 33 we read: “In geological history, the rate of new species has traditionally been higher than the rate of species extinction, which has contributed to the increase in the level of biodiversity ... Although exact numbers on how many species disappear each day or what the rate of loss of the gene pool cannot be reproduced, it is obvious that human activities in recent decades have caused the rate of extinction of mammals and birds, for example, to become much more intense and far exceed the estimated average rate of loss of species in previous millennia." That is, ecologists are worried that now the species diversity is declining - the loss of species is faster than the appearance of new ones.

  And on the next page is a table with data on the rate of extinction of species. Over the past 500 years, among multicellular animals and plants, 816 species have disappeared, or an average of 163 species per century. Since now the loss of species is faster than the formation of new ones, this figure can be considered an upper estimate of the rate of speciation. It is two orders of magnitude larger than your estimate from below, which is necessary to ensure evolution. But here only data on multicellular animals and plants are taken into account, the total number of species of which (according to the same table) is about 1.37 million. higher animals and plants, tk. the concept of reproductive isolation does not apply to protozoa.

  In general, we have received consistent assessments. It takes at least 2 new species every 100 years to drive evolution. Observational data suggest that species (only multicellular) are formed no faster than 160 species in 100 years. Everything converges.

  First, the more biodiversity, the more different ecological niches. This means that the ecosystem is able to accommodate more different species. Accordingly, competition decreases, specialization increases, etc. If this is not taken into account, then the equation for the number of species will be exponential, as you wrote down (dN/dT=aN, N=exp(kT)). However, taking into account the reservation made, the equation takes the form dN/dT=bN^2. The growth rate is proportional to the number of divergent species (N) and the diversity of habitat conditions (~N). The solution of this difur gives N~1/T, that is, not exponential, but much faster hyperbolic growth. Such growth, generally speaking, should lead to catastrophes or qualitative transitions. But this is a completely different topic.

  Secondly, there is such a thing as horizontal (interspecies) transfer of genetic material. It is carried out by retroviruses like the AIDS virus. Due to horizontal transfer, a successful mutation in one species can, in principle, be transferred to another unrelated one. This is especially effective in protozoa. Due to this, the evolution tree, generally speaking, ceases to be a tree and turns into a directed graph of a more general type.

  Thirdly, in addition to the evolution of species (macroevolution), there are still elements within the species, for example, the process of developing immunity to a pathogen includes a kind of microevolutionary process in the body's immune system. And this immunity, under certain circumstances, can be inherited (this is now the cutting edge of biological research).

  To answer

> In this case, the rate for today is V=k*exp(k*T)=0.017 species per year, i.e. approximately 2 new species every 100 years.
> And this is the MINIMUM score, ie. in fact, speciation must proceed at a much higher rate!
> Is it real?
It's more than real. For the appearance of new species of moths, several months are enough, for flies about a year. For example, after the development of fairly intensive transport communication, several new species of long-winged flies appeared on small oceanic islands where there had never been flies. Several flies got into the transport, some were blown into the ocean, some gave offspring. Offspring with longer wings produced more offspring, those with shorter wings blew more than they bred, and so on.
The rate of formation of a new species strongly depends on the time of reaching reproductive age. There are champions for whom the formation of a new species can take a few days, and the ability to interbreed with their former "compatriots" will be completely lost.
Read, dig, now there is a lot of research on this topic ...

To answer

Yes, let evolutionists BELIEVE what they want.
And that the billionth DNA was formed by chance or "naturally" without the participation of intelligent forces.
And the fact that all the systems of the body have self-organized into a single system capable of writing this post now.
Let them believe! The Constitution of the Russian Federation guarantees freedom of religion =)
"And the fool said in his heart: there is no God" Ps.131:1
http://www.one-way.ru

To answer

• No one has anything against faith. Disputes begin when FAITH is called KNOWLEDGE. When it is called true in the last resort, beyond doubt.
  For example, here is the phrase:
  "The theory of chemical evolution, leading to the emergence of life, is currently the only _natural science_ hypothesis. There are simply no others."
  Absolutely politically correct. Nothing to complain about and I have no objections.
  But here's this one:
  "...there is a fact of evolution"
  Sounds like "there is a fact of God"

  And further. For some reason, many people believe that creationism interferes with the study of life in particular or science in general. But this is absurd. Archaeologists have found an ancient mechanism. Obviously someone made it. Does the fact that it was made by someone, and did not arise by itself, really prevent us from studying it in all available ways? Of course no. So it is with the universe. Whether someone did it or not should not matter to science. It can and should be studied in any scenario. The main thing is to be honest with yourself and unbiased.

  And here is the problem with impartiality. :-(

  To answer

  • To answer

>But this one: "...there is a fact of evolution" Sounds like "there is a fact of God"

I don't see anything like that. "... there is a fact of evolution" - but the truth does exist, the organism develops unlike its ancestors - it evolves, let's say with a change in living conditions. This is the proof of evolution, in this case a single organism.

>Many people somehow believe that creationism interferes with the study of life in particular or science in general. But this is absurd. Archaeologists have found an ancient mechanism. Obviously someone made it. Does the fact that it was made by someone, and did not arise by itself, really prevent us from studying it in all available ways? Of course no.

Of course yes! After all, if a mechanism arose on its own, we can only study its capabilities, look at its actions, but if it was created by someone, then the questions are important - why? why? who? - the meaning of it all.

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To answer

How tenacious the near-scientific myths are: on the one hand, the supposedly fossilized remains of the “Piltdown Man”, which creationists are still procrastinating. On the other hand, the primitive myth of natural selection, still actively exploited by the “synthetic theory of evolution” (STE).
Doesn't the author of The Theory of Evolution know that Darwinian natural selection (EO) doesn't exist in nature? Precisely Darwinian, that is, among individuals. In the 2-sex world, selection takes place at the level of individual genes, as well as at the level of populations and species - heretical "vidism" in the eyes of the STE figures. But not the selection of individual genotypes. It is known for at least 80 years - after T. Morgan, who discovered the phenomenon of crossing over; read, for example, from the die-hard Darwinian but honest zoologist Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, 1980). Take a look at STE stalwart Vern Grant's book at
hi-bio.narod.ru/lit/grant/intro.html
Evolutionary Process, 1991, subtitle Selection at the species level in Ch. Levels of Selection): A serious evolutionist does not think it possible to pass over a slippery topic in silence. Or in the publication of Doctor of Biology V.P.
But in the university (!) textbook Evolution - ways and mechanisms, 2005, - on
evolution2.narod.ru
the nasty question about Darwinian EO is not mentioned even half a word.
What is there to blame the author of "The Theory of Evolution": a poorly meaningful mishmash of hypotheses of abiogenesis, STE stereotypes - and even ideas of punctuated equilibrium. Set for the layman. By the way, I note that there are theories - and there are hypotheses; it is not harmful for the author of a scientific and entertaining essay to distinguish between the two concepts. You can't hide the class; see how the core principle of Darwinism is interpreted here: "The idea of ​​natural selection ... is based on two assumptions: 1) representatives of ... a species differ in some way from each other, and 2) there is competition for resources." Bravo; the author carefully omitted the 3rd - Darwin's key! - position. Just the one that does not hold in 2-hollow populations (as opposed to asexual ones).
Okay, popular essay, but what are professional evolutionists! Is it conceivable for a scientific theory to hide from the public such inconvenient circumstances - from among the fundamental ones? And in STE “in the blue eye” they continue to talk about the forms of EO: ... disruptive, etc. What are they about? Imagine: forms of obviously non-existent phenomenon. In the opinion of an Orthodox atheist, system analyst and, by the way, a convinced evolutionist, such things in the XXI century. absolutely incredible. However, the fact is - as in a TV program. It is not clear what is funnier: the STE figures are not aware of elementary things? Or do they know it very well, but - how can I put it mildly - habitually distort the cards? For decades now...
One such number is enough to write off the STE forever. However, there ... there is nowhere to put a seal. If you want details, let me know; I'll show you in good faith. It is clear what is happening: cybernetics, information and systems theorists, physicists and chemists are accustomed to trust their scientific colleagues. Since evolutionary biologists say, Darwinian EO is indeed the driving force behind evolution. Gentlemen don't check. And since they take their word for it, then such a card opens up to Vasily Ivanovich ... You won’t believe it, Petka.
Science habitually trusts STE, while creationism unmistakably strikes at the vulnerable points of the orthodox evolutionary doctrine. Visit, for example, Deacon A. Kuraev's portal forum. Hegumen Benjamin, candidate of theology, St. Petersburg is quoted there; very instructive. “… Creationists require evolutionary scientists to remain scientists and not wishful thinking.
... Intraspecific adaptation to environmental conditions (which was falsely called microevolution) and artificial hybridization (within one species!) Have nothing to do with the interconversion of species. Darwinists skillfully mix the two questions in order to deceive the gullible philistines who are "too lazy to delve into."
Amazingly accurate. Call (reversible!) genetic-adaptive processes in 2-sex populations microevolution - and thereby obtain formal grounds for being called the theory of evolution. Take the definition in ch. The variability of natural populations (Evolution - ways and mechanisms): "the process of evolution, - in STE is commonly understood - as a change in the frequencies of different alleles in populations." The standard wording is in all languages. The author of the manual is a Doctor of Biology, and it is intended for students, graduate students and young professionals. And for everyone who is interested. The non-biologist reader is shocked: it means that evolution did not take place at all until the last 600-800 million years, when multicellular and 2-hollow scheme arose ??? So how can it be… Decent W. Grant (Evolutionary Process, ch. 5 Population Dynamics) 14 years earlier called the genetic-adaptive processes microevolution bluntly; Since then, STE has made significant progress ...
Well, in addition to genetic-adaptive processes, there is nothing there, according to the “Hamburg account”. No theory, not even any coherent, internally coherent hypothesis; a heap of absurdities, forgeries and omissions. A shameless hoax. Which does not imply that there is no movement towards a scientific theory of evolution: read serious literature - apart from STE. Everything has already been said there, although it has not yet been assembled into a coherent structure. Well, if you prefer ready-made, then contact STE ...

To answer

Let's count.
For 4 million years, if we assume that the duration of one generation of people is about 20 years, we are separated from the first Homo by only 200 thousand generations. Question: are these 200 thousand generations enough to "get" today's man from Homo Erectus and other ancestors?
For comparison: Drosophila has been "tormented" for more than 100 years (hundreds of thousands of generations) by targeted mutations, but none of these mutations has been fixed in phylogeny. Not to mention such significant changes that separate man from creatures living millions of years ago.
No, in the theory of evolution, both in the Darwinian interpretation and in its synthetic version, there is still much that is not clear.

To answer

It is funny to read how people build mathematical models by adding 2 + 2 on a calculator, it is not possible to calculate the rate of formation of species because there are a huge number of variables. A certain number of species have come down to our time, most of them have already been studied and systematized, the rest are still waiting in line, the process of speciation went in different directions, new species arose and died out at the same time, we can only represent part of the species diversity that had place to be. The rest of the fossils have yet to be discovered, and some will never be found at all. An example is the "Drake equation", depending on the values ​​of the variables, the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Universe can range from zero to millions. In general, who is aiming for what result and who likes what numbers, he thinks so, but there is no really accurate data yet and it’s not a fact that it will ever appear at all.
For more than a hundred years, attacks on Darwin's theory have not stopped, and some of them have a completely scientifically based basis, but returning to the question of the complexity of the subject under study, it should be noted that any model describing the process is designed to present it in a simplified form in order to understand a very complex its process needs to be simplified (no one will argue that evolution and speciation are very complex processes). Naturally, Darwin's model cannot answer all questions, and it does not need to, because if it described absolutely all processes in particular, it would not be consistent in general. Critics of Darwinism can be invited to develop a theory that would reliably describe phenomena and predict discoveries, make a revolution in the scientific world and everyone will happily forget the name of this Darwin and what is the essence of his obscurantist theories and will forever inscribe in history the name of "Vasya Pupkin" who everyone opened his eyes to how everything really happened, but so far everything boils down to just statements like "and here you have Comrade Darwin, the inconsistency comes out, hehe!" The theory of evolution is not the ultimate truth, it is neither good nor bad, it has simply helped science over the past hundred years to greatly expand the boundaries of knowledge and will continue to push them further until a worthy alternative appears.

To answer

Lords who deny the abiogenic origin of life. The only alternative is something like creationism. But then a natural question arises. Where did the creator or creator come from? The answer in the style: "in the beginning there was a word and the word was God" can only be accepted by those who are completely fooled by religion and who do not know how to think creatively and critically. Let's leave this quote from the myths of the ancient Jews aside and give the creationists another chance.
Let some experimenter really created our earthly life, but the question remains open, Where did he come from? Thus, creationism does not solve the issue, but only postpones the solution of the issue.
And you can resort to it only when there are real grounds for this, and not myths.
But having taken creationism seriously, it will be necessary to begin to study the question of where the creator came from just as seriously.
It took about 11 billion years of physical evolution, about 3.5 billion years of biological evolution, for a species to homo sapiens formed, and about 300 thousand years of its "social" evolution and about 400 more years of the existence of science, so that some individuals of this species could seriously think about the origin of life.
But for others, those 13.5 billion years of evolution have gone in vain. They say "in the beginning there was the word and the word was God" or "All the will of God."
Shame on humanity. But it seems more relevant in the 21st century not "Forward to knowledge" but "Back to obscurantism"

To answer

>"It took about 11 billion years of physical evolution..."
So-so... 11 billion. And how do you know that? Oh yes! You were told kocmolog"and. Why didn't they tell you what happened before that? What is the singularity that preceded the Big Bang? Why did this Big Bang happen all of a sudden?
What is the anthropic principle alone worth, according to which the Universe evolved with a specific goal, so that in the end there would be an observer using the nickname "Kosmolog". After all, with the rejection of the Aristotelian "target causes" and began modern European science at the turn of the XVI-XVII centuries. Galileo, Bacon, Descartes would consider the cosmologists of the 20th century, who returned to Aristotle, obscurantists.
Have you ever wondered why not "anthropic law", or "anthropic theory"? Yes, because the principle can neither be proved nor disproved! To science, as you understand it, that is, to a tool for obtaining true knowledge, the principles have nothing to do. They are from the tools of metaphysics.
By the way, a great supporter of Darwinism, Karl Popper, defined the Darwinian theory as a "metaphysical project". A scientific theory is created, after all, not only to explain known phenomena, but also to predict phenomena from the same series, which do not yet exist, but which will certainly be. Try it, using the theory of evolution, predict what species will appear in the next n-year!
Popper himself mocked evolutionists even more mercilessly: “Suppose we found life on Mars, consisting of only three types of bacteria. Will Darwinism postulating the diversity of life be refuted? - No way. We will say that these three species are only forms among other mutants which turned out to be quite well adapted for survival. And we will say the same if there is only one species (or none) "(Popper, K. Darwinism as a metaphysical research program// Questions of Philosophy. - 1995. - No. 12. - S. 39-49).
How then, from the point of view of a culturologist, to call evolution (singularity, anthropic principle, etc.)? All these are ordinary mythologemes, nothing more than explanatory myths. This is what science has sunk to, to a metaphysical belief in unverifiable principles. So how is it better than faith in God, which everyone can test? Don't believe? Try it yourself.
By the way, mind you, among Orthodox biologists the vast majority are evolutionists. For them, evolution is the history of creation, and the study of how it really was is an exciting contact with the wisdom of God. "God does not play dice" (A. Einstein).

To answer

• And where are we Russians here?

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  To answer

  >"By the way, note that among Orthodox biologists the vast majority are evolutionists. For them, evolution is the history of creation, and the study of how it really was is an exciting contact with the wisdom of God"

  Try to answer an elementary question: "And where did this very god come from, who blinded everything?"

  The answer, unfortunately, is elementary: the Jews came up with it, then it’s true that they handed it over to the Romans for crucifixion, but this is already a purely internal Jewish question.

  But the development of European civilization, thanks to Christianity invented by the Jews, they, the Jews, managed to slow down for 10 or even 13 centuries.

  And where are we Russians here?

  Unfortunately, a polygamist and a drunkard, but a subtly cunning politician Vladimir (for some reason a saint?) decided to introduce Christianity in Russia in order to gain greater political power over his competitors with his help.
  But it should be recognized that although this was Christianity invented by the Jews, it nevertheless turned out to be a lesser evil than Judaism or Islam.
  Otherwise, the Russians would also become freaks with mutilated ends. But that's where the positives of Christianity end.
  Any fabrications about the benefits of monotheism are nonsense.
  Any religion at the present time is an unnecessary garbage for humanity.
  Religion gave some benefit by offering moral principles, but even here one can do without religious delirium by adopting moral principles, for example, based on the criterion of the benefit or harm of any deeds for the development and survival of mankind as a whole.
  And about the dense statements about how it is known about the age of the Universe, then for the half-wits I inform you. At least from the current moment until the moment of neutralization of the primary plasma (approximately 300 thousand years after the Big Bang), the age is confirmed by OBSERVATIONAL DATA !!! Direct observations over the entire range electromagnetic waves, from gamma to microwave background radiation.
  There are many theoretical models about what happened before from the beginning to the formation of the CMB, but there is still a lot of effort to choose the most plausible scenario.
  What was before BV. For example, I developed a very plausible and logically coherent scenario. Without disclosing the details here, the overall picture is as follows.
  The Big Multiverse is eternal and infinite. Its main characteristic is Expansion (dark energy). At a certain stage in the existence of a particular local universe, it gives rise to many new local universes. The local universes are not interconnected due to the finite speed of light. When the expansion speed exceeds the speed of light, local universes become fundamentally inaccessible for mutual observation. Hence the illusion of the uniqueness of our local universe. This process of the birth of the evolution of death and the generation of new local universes is eternal and endless.
  This also solves the anthropic principle. Even if the conditions for the emergence of life were formed purely by chance, then despite the slight probability of such an event in an infinite number of emerging and dying local universes, such an event sooner or later HAS to occur.
  So here are my weak-minded religious opponents!!!

  To answer

  • Dear Cosmologist! Are you absolutely right when you ask the question, "Where did this God Himself come from"? This is where it should have started. The fact is that the question “where does everything come from?” (including the Universe, let the Multiverse - for unbelieving materialists, or God - for believers) has no answer from within the natural sciences. For a very simple reason.

    The natural-science method assumes that all material processes take place within time, moreover, irreversible. The evidence of the modern scientific method is based on the principle of causality. But causality is called a principle and not a law because it cannot be proved by the scientific method. Causality is an extra-scientific (that is, metaphysical) basis of modern empirical-theoretical science. After all, our new European science is the very one whose method was laid down by F. Bacon at the beginning. XVII century, when Aristolean data collection and the construction of a generalizing-inductive theoretical model, he supplemented with a third component - testing the theory in practice, best of all experimental.

    In the 1930s, the method was narrowed down by positivists (O. Comte, G. Spencer, J. Mill, and others). Metaphysical problems were completely eliminated from it, "positivity" is only that which is verified by reproducible experience. But already to late XIX century, it became clear that "positivity", or rather, the experience of positivity, we people have nothing to register. By sight? We see not objects, but reflected or refracted light. Again, the light hits the cones and rods in the bottom of the eyeball, where under its influence a chemical reaction occurs, turning on an electrical impulse in a neuron that stretches from each of the cones and rods to the visual center of the brain. What do we see? Items? Light? Sticks and cones? Neurons? Or some kind of image collected by our brain, in which the brain compensated for all the distortions and imperfections of our vision?

    And yet, with the help of vision and the usual ruler, we can fix the numerical expression of size, weight, etc. By the way, a person deprived of sight cannot do this… True, first we must agree on the units of measurement.

    The positivists of the second generation began to be called empirio-criticists (E. Mach, R. Avenarius, A. Poincaré, P. Duhem). They made the discovery, unpleasant for themselves, that self-verifiable "positivity" cannot be achieved by any primary experience, by any observation and measurement, even by the simplest comparison of an object with a graphed ruler scale. When it comes to more complex measuring instruments (for example, in electrical engineering), then one or another theory is initially laid in them, that is, a certain speculative model, albeit a mathematical one, which is obviously not self-evident, since it needs to be confirmed by arguments, in its own right. turn, inevitably containing theoretical provisions. And so on ad infinitum. The "second" positivists came to the conclusion that the most we can do in our desire to fix "positivity" is to describe our experience as accurately as possible, decomposing it into extremely "atomic" components. At the same time, “positivity” is not at all pure “objectivity”, but a reality perceived and reflected by the subject, that is, by us, with the help of our senses. In this regard, the American positivists, who are also pragmatists, first turned to the value-sociological study of religious experience as an objective given (W. James).

    Third positivists, who called themselves "neo-positivists" or logical positivists, in the first third of the 20th century took up the task posed by the second positivists. It is the task of creating a fully formalized language for accurate description experience. The logical positivists failed. The most famous theorems of Kurt Gödel, proving that in any theory there will always be statements that can neither be proved nor disproved, based on the axioms of this theory. There are no unambiguous terms in the language, all of them are drawn from a spontaneous context, which, ultimately, has a social nature. Society is the breeding ground for all terms and theories, they crystallize with them in order to influence it with their help.

    Therefore, the fourth positivists, or "post-positivists", recognized science itself as a product of society, the community of scientists. Scientific theories are formed and replace one another for non-scientific reasons, they are initiated by value orientations. Only sociology is capable of evaluating the laws according to which science functions. The desire to find the truth does not belong to scientific, but to value motives. According to K. Popper, science advances not when a theory is confirmed, but when it is rejected in favor of more adequate theories. T. Kuhn introduced the concept of a scientific paradigm, the carrier of which is the community of scientists. Theories develop not because of their inner truth, because of the existing socio-cultural conditions and prevailing values. The same bizarre historical and social conditions also influence the norms governing the rules for collecting data, the requirements for formulating theories and for evidence-based argumentation. By the way, dear Cosmologist, today's generally accepted requirements for the evidence of hypotheses do not allow your very plausible model to be recognized as a proven theory. After all, even Hugh Everett, who was the first to put forward in the 50s of the XX century. the theory of the Multiverse was aware of its unprovability, since all other worlds, except for our only one, are fundamentally unobservable.

    Moreover, when you include the concepts of “eternity” and “infinity” in your theory, you immediately turn it from a scientific-like one into a philosophical-metaphysical one that does not require natural scientific evidence. Yes, mathematics operates with the concept of infinity, but mathematics, like logic, reflects not the structure of the physical world, but the structure of people's thinking. In this sense, these disciplines do not belong to the natural sciences. Infinity is a mythologeme, not an intelligible concept, it is an area of ​​non-explicable sensations and values, in short, the area of ​​religion. After all, religiosity is easiest to analyze from the standpoint of the theory of values.

    For example, believing representatives of monotheistic religions experience God as a Personality, moreover, as a person representing the greatest value of all possible (“As the soul is better than the body, so God is the best of all He created”, Maximus the Confessor, VII century). Atheists who fight against religion, on the contrary, hear a vague threat in the concept of God, because if, suddenly, He exists, then he will ask them for a lot.

    From the question, "Where does God come from," from the origin of God, we began. For those who are in time and have not yet stepped into Eternity, this question is meaningless. God is the Creator of the world and time, including, He Himself is outside of time, but we still don’t understand this, how can one not understand how the red color differs from green. Anyone who believes in the eternity of the “Greater Multiverse” also considers the question of where it comes from to be meaningless. And this question, in fact, is not scientific, but metaphysical and religious.

    Another issue is evidence. In the field of modern natural science, scientific theories are proved by experimental practice, or observations. At the same time, it is known in advance that sooner or later the theory proven today will be replaced tomorrow by a more perfect one. Those concepts and ideas that are not intended for Popper's "falsification", that is, for replacement by more advanced ones, are recognized as metaphysical, or even religious.

    A believing person, in contrast, cognizes God not by reason and not even by intellect. He cognizes God as well as any other person through interpersonal contact, which can be described as a meeting. A person who once turned to God “You” with all his inner thirst receives the experience of His answer, and this experience turns his whole being upside down. Do you really think that millions of people who are ready to die, if only not to lose this main value of theirs, God, and those who have died and are dying, are doing this out of frivolity and stupidity? These people really received a personal answer from God, the experience of His conversion into the soul. Absolutely indisputable proof for them is their own experience. Indeed, who can convince me, or you, of the existence of God? There can be no authority on this matter other than mine/your own. There is no one to ask, except ... Except God Himself! Once upon a time, your obedient servant went this way. Believe me, the experience of a non-believer is instantly replaced by the experience of personal knowledge of God, as soon as you experience His answer to you.

    So don't scold nature too much for its imperfection :) I don't think that the state of singularity lasts at all (in our view, since there is no time), rather, the process does not even end completely, because from the surface of rotation of the body there will certainly be kvens break loose. Well, what then? And the most important thing begins: the formation of Space. Kvens - small balls, poured out by a bag of singularity, bridge the Space with their bodies.
    I wonder in which direction the kvens will be twisted along the axis?
    What is the question, they will all twist in the direction opposite to the rotation of the body of the singularity. This explains why there are NO and cannot be antiparticles in our Universe. Here, perhaps only at the poles, some kvens will acquire a different-sided rotation, but they will be a meager number that does not play any role.
    So, the bag is untied, new batches of Kwen are pouring in, and what are the old ones doing? And they move further, are forced out, so to speak. But! Since the expansion does not follow a three-dimensional scenario, but according to a pi-dimensional one (3.14 ...), then even rows and lines in the ranks will not work. I do not know how the structure of Space will be built: a tetragonal or hexagonal crystal, but there will be structural defects in any case.
    Regions of Space with defects inevitably become centers where there is a kind of hitch in the advancement of kvens, and the inevitable result of this is the formation of new particles during the merging of primary elements.
    This mechanism is clear. All Space is filled with kvens. Since they are the fundamental principle of everything, it will not be possible to notice, even indirectly. Defects arising in the construction of a spatial lattice by kvens will be called nodes of the first order. On nodes of the first order, nodes of the second order will inevitably arise. Here the enlarged particles will merge, forming even larger ones. At the nodes of the second order, nodes of the third order are formed ... and so on. All galaxies are built on nodes of the nth order. I don’t know what the number n is, let mathematicians count.
    Isn't this evolution?
    And now, physics - wow!!! - see how your waves will spread. The distance between kvens will correspond to the smallest number by which everything will be divided without a remainder of the wavelength, for example, L. Nodes of the first, second, etc. orders can be expressed as integer multiples of L. For each wave there is its own node. But the speed, of course, will change. How? Well, I'm not a mathematician, so I can't calculate, and it's not interesting to me, since there is no practical use, and it interferes with thinking further. Who wants and loves to count, please, put the flag in your hands.
    So do not try to create a unified field theory, because there is only a unified field theory, here it is, in front of you.

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Anaximander. 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 bounded 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 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 creation only general plan, which varies in specific embodiments. Having applied Leibniz's "law of continuity" to taxonomy, he opposed the existence of discrete species in a year, considering species to be the fruit of the imagination 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 animal body plan. 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 caused criticism from the creationist Georges Cuvier and his school, absolutely reasoned on 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 talk 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. Together with Cuvier, his French colleague paleontologist and geologist A. Brongniard (1770-1847) made his contribution to stratigraphy, and, independently of them, 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 (“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 for so long give a satisfactory schematic explanation of geological facts in the eyes of the best researchers and thinkers, if it were not 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 Lamarck's ideas, spoke 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 over 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 he carefully watched how criticism of particular inaccuracies turned into criticism of the very idea of ​​\u200b\u200bvariability of species, so as not to repeat such errors. 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 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 urgent persuasion 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' works, but simply had no desire to get acquainted with them. We can only guess how the public would have reacted if Matthew had thought to release his evolutionary views under the title "Possibility of changing plant species 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 indeterminate 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 norm of the species 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 recessivity) 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 Darwin's book on German it was Bronn who translated, who did not share his views, but who believes that the new idea has the right to exist (the 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 applied to the idea of ​​kinship, and it, warmed up by Haeckel’s personal enthusiasm, captures contemporaries. All zoologists, anatomists, embryologists, and paleontologists of any seriousness begin to build entire forests of phylogenetic trees. With the light hand of Haeckel, it spreads as the only possible idea of ​​​​monophilia - 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 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 wood 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. Exploring embryonic development 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. Weismann's harsh criticism of this concept caused him personally and his theory, and then to the study of chromosomes in general, a negative attitude on the part of 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 systematics 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 ontogenesis, eliminating deviations from the norm (morphoses) and forming a stable development trajectory (creod). 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 deviant paths of development becomes possible, and multiple morphoses arise. Some of these morphoses receive a selective advantage, and during subsequent generations their ES develops a new sustainable 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. Ecosystem - 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 part of society, almost from the moment of the birth of evolutionary biology, there has been a certain opposition to this doctrine 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 just 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.

TO late XVIII in. Biology has accumulated a vast amount of descriptive material. It became known that even outwardly very distant species (for example, perch and monkey) in their internal structure reveal similarities. It was very important to establish from the fossil remains of the fact that the species of animals and plants that had lived on Earth for a long time differed from modern ones. This means that the species of plants and animals were not always the same as they are now. From the practice of agriculture, it is known that the external structure and productivity of plants and animals can change very significantly with changes in the conditions for their cultivation and maintenance. All these facts led the most progressive scientists to doubt the immutability of species.

The indisputable authority of the church was sharply undermined by the first bourgeois revolutions in Europe that were brewing. Philosophers-materialists entered into an open struggle with religion. It was in this situation that the first scientific theory of the evolution of the organic world arose, created by the French scientist Jean Baptiste Lamarck(1744-1829) and set forth in his book "Philosophy of Zoology" (1809).

A firm scientific conviction in the variability of species arose in Lamarck on the basis of the new factual material that was obtained by biology towards the end of the 18th century. French materialist philosophers also had a great influence on Lamarck. His own work on the taxonomy of plants and animals convinced him that it is often difficult to establish sharp boundaries between closely related species. As a result, Lamarck comes to his first conclusion: species do not remain constant, they change slowly and constantly.

The second conclusion was the assertion of the fact of evolution. When considering the entire animal world as a whole, it is easy to notice that there is a consistent complication of the entire organization of animals from the lowest (ciliates) to the highest (). This complication has, as it were, a stepped character, “that is why it was called gradation by Lamarck. In the fact of gradation, Lamarck saw a reflection of the course of the historical development of the organic world. Thus, Lamarck, for the first time in the history of biology, formulated a proposition on the evolutionary development of living nature: life arises by spontaneous generation of the simplest living bodies from substances of inanimate nature; further historical development follows the path of progressive complication of organisms, i.e., the path of evolution. The product of such an evolution, although with great reservations, Lamarck also recognizes man.

But the statement of the fact of evolution is not yet an evolutionary theory. Every theory explains the causes of an established fact. Therefore, Lamarck, convinced of the historical development of the organic world, proceeds to the question of the causes of evolution. However, Lamarck connects two interrelated aspects of a single process of evolution (change in individual species and the general progress of living nature) with different reasons. This is one of the weaknesses of his evolutionary theory. As you know, in Darwin's theory, both progress and progress are explained by one common cause - natural selection.

The reason for the change in species, the slow and gradual transformation of one species into another, Lamarck saw in a slow and gradual change in external conditions: conditions change (climate, food), and after this, species change from generation to generation. In organisms lacking a nervous system (plants, lower animals), these changes occur in a direct way. So, in the arrowhead, the underwater leaves are ribbon-shaped (direct influence of the aquatic environment), and the surface ones have a wide leaf blade (direct influence of the air environment). In organisms with a developed nervous system (higher animals), the influence of the environment on the organism is carried out indirectly: a change in living conditions changes the behavior of the animal, its habits; in an animal, some organs begin to function differently. As a result, some organs exercise intensely, while others, on the contrary, stop exercising, and this entails a change in the structure of these organs and the body as a whole.

Thus, changes in organisms, arising both directly and indirectly, become, according to Lamarck, immediately useful, adaptive.

Lamarck believed that organs developed under the influence of increased exercise: for example, the long neck and front legs of a giraffe, the wide swimming membranes between the fingers of waterfowl, etc. On the other hand, organs that have ceased to exercise gradually become underdeveloped: underdeveloped eyes in a mole, underdeveloped wings in an ostrich, etc.

If changes in organisms caused by direct or indirect influence of environmental conditions are repeated in a number of generations, then they are inherited and become signs of new species. This is how Lamarck explained the change in species in nature.

There are serious flaws in Lamarck's interpretation of the causes of species change. Thus, the effect of exercise or non-exercise of the organs cannot explain changes in such features as the color of the animal's integument, the thickness of the fur, and a number of others, to which the concept of "exercise" is inapplicable. As already shown in the section « » far from all changes that occur in organisms under the influence of living conditions are inherited. This means that not all of them can become material for the hereditary change of species.

The cause of gradation, i.e., the progressive complication of living nature as a whole, Lamarck could not explain the effect of living conditions on organisms. Therefore, he quite arbitrarily admitted that in nature there is some initial, law of internal striving for perfection. According to these ideas of Lamarck, all living things, starting with the spontaneously generated protozoa, fall under the influence of the said law and in an infinitely long series of generations inevitably progressively become more complex. It is easy to see that such an explanation is essentially idealistic. Thus, the fact of the progressive complication of organisms in the course of historical development did not find a materialistic explanation in Lamarck.

The general assessment of the role of J. B. Lamarck in the development of biology is as follows:

1. J. B. Lamarck's great merit to science is the assertion of the fact of the evolution of the organic world, his uncompromising struggle against the dogma of the immutability of species, his attempt to understand the nature of the interaction of the organism with the environment.
2. The level of science of that time did not allow J. B. Lamarck to reveal the real materialistic reasons for the change in species and the progressive development of living nature.