Archive for September, 2012
The theory of evolution as outlined by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859) is a continuous process of natural selection producing “slight, successive” changes over long periods of time resulting in the origin of new species. At the time, knowledge of chromosomes was sketchy, at best.
The general principles of chromosomal action were not discovered until 1875 by German biologist Oskar Hertwig while he was studying reproduction in sea urchins; three years after the last and sixth edition of The Origin of Species in 1872. Continue Reading
In a landmark book The Language of God (2006), geneticist Francis Collins advanced Ohno’s concept of junk DNA as “powerful support for Darwin‘s theory of evolution” while serving as director of the National Center for Human Genome Research.
The Smithsonian declares that the “[s]cientific evidence show that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.” This forward sounding statement, however, is scientifically unsound.
The term “genetics,” was first coined in 1905 by English geneticist William Bateson in a personal letter to colleague Alan Sedgwick. Since then, genetics has emerged to be the center of evolutionary research for more than a century.
This last week, the research article in the journal Science entitled “A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic Denisovan Individual” captured media headlines worldwide. Continue Reading