Saturday 6 June 2009

Darwin, Natural Selection and Evolution By Cameron Webb Have you ever wondered where we came from? How did we arrive on earth, was it because of god creating Adam and Eve and is this the reason why we are all here. Or did this all happen through evolution, evolving and adapting from our descendants? I am going to try and explain what scientists think and what the church thinks, and if this wasn't enough I am going to talk about the god of biology, our friend Charles Darwin and how he put forward his ground breaking theory called Natural Selection and how this single theory changed the way that we think about our past. It is thought that we all all other living organisms i.e., animals and plants, once lived in the sea and that we all descended from an organism called a Eukaryotes, This is one of the smallest living things that the earth has held and it is quite a thought to think that every living thing that we know of descended from this tiny organism which is smaller than a red blood cell(this organism cells are organized into complex structures enclosed within membranes). And from there on in we started evolving from algae to vertebrates. The first vertebrates that we think lived in our sea's was a eel shaped creature that sucked on algae for food, in the picture shown it is a lamprey sucking on to a fish, and sort of cleaning the fish but it is really searching for small organisms to eat. But the amazing thing so that this picture is really good proof that evolution has taken place as I previously said the Lamprey was the first vertebrate to swim in our sea's so there could not of possibly be any fish, so the lamprey has had to evolve and develop to change the technique for eating. And so from an eel shaped creature we then start to see the fish shaped creatures starting to develop. But it was the species called the Tetra pods that we have to thank, for they made the huge leap and started to take on off the biggest leaps that the animal kingdom has ever seen, they stepped on land, even though they could not survive on land for more than two minutes they had eventually made it onto land. So from these Tetra pods came the Amphibians Newts and Frogs, then came along the reptiles and birds and from that came the marsupials Kola's and Kangaroos and then came along the entrains and finally came along the Primates Humans and apes. At last we have arrived at the Primates but I have missed out a lot of other organism for example the insects, the fungi. This is the fascinating about eve lotion how have changed so much from an very small organism to over six foot tall, how has eve lotion mate so many other types of species? This very question is what fascinates so many people to do evolutionary science. Part two of this article will be out soon where I will talk about Darwin and the battle between science and the church!