According to Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, characteristics such as camouflage that help an animal to survive will tend to evolve in any population.

According to Charles Darwin's 1859 theory of natural selection, features such as camouflage evolved by providing individual animals with a reproductive advantage, enabling them to leave more offspring, on average, than other members of the same species.

With the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution in 1859, the concept of a " natural system " of taxonomy gained a theoretical basis, and the idea was born that groups used in a system of classification should represent branches on the evolutionary tree of life.

Darwin's daughter Henrietta ( Etty ) wrote to her father: " Is it fair that Lyell always calls your theory a modification of Lamarck's?

However, unlike Johnson, Hodge confined the term to exclude those like Asa Gray who combined Christian faith with support for Darwin's natural selection theory, before answering the question posed in the book's title by concluding: " It is Atheism.

This last aspect of Erewhon reveals the influence of Charles Darwin's evolution theory ; Butler had read On the Origin of Species soon after it was published in 1859.

: I regret that reviewers have in some cases been inclined to treat the chapters on Machines as an attempt to reduce Mr. Darwin's theory to an absurdity.

Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory (" ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny ") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species ' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.

One of Haeckel's earliest proponents was Carl Gegenbaur at the University of Jena ( 1865 – 1873 ), during which both men were absorbing the impact of Darwin's theory.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was appealing to some economists, sociologists and political scientists ( most notably Walter Bagehot and William Graham Sumner ) who adapted and rationalized the invisible hand by incorporating the popular idea of the survival of the fittest.

Based on principles laid out by William Smith almost a hundred years before the publication of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, the principles of succession were developed independently of evolutionary thought.

" Darwin's theory of evolution challenges the teleological argument by postulating an alternative explanation to that of an intelligent designer — namely, evolution by natural selection.

* 1858 – Charles Darwin receives a paper from Alfred Russel Wallace that includes nearly identical conclusions about evolution as Darwin's own, prompting Darwin to publish his theory.

In natural philosophy he asserted Charles Darwin's theory of evolution unswervingly and set about to prove Darwin's hypothesis that humans arose in Africa.

# A scientific theory may not contain any theoretical terms ( an example of this is Darwin's original theory of evolution ).

* 1925 – Scopes Trial: John T. Scopes is indicted for teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

The concept of natural selection was originally developed in the absence of a valid theory of heredity ; at the time of Darwin's writing, nothing was known of modern genetics.

Social Darwinism is a social theory which holds that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is a model, not only for the development of biological traits in a population, but also as an application for human social institutions — the existing social institutions being implicitly declared as normative.

The concept of natural selection was originally developed in the absence of a valid theory of heredity ; at the time of Darwin's writing, nothing was known of modern genetics.

Darwin's theory of natural selection as a mechanism of evolutionary change of organisms is utilized to describe the development of human societies and particularly the development of mental and physical traits of members of such societies.

While often seen as rejecting Darwin's theory of branching evolution for a more linear Lamarckian " biogenic law " of progressive evolution, this is not accurate: Haeckel used the Lamarckian picture to describe the ontogenic and phylogenic history of the individual species, but agreed with Darwin about the branching nature of all species from one, or a few, original ancestors.

The ecology and evolution of Darwin's Finches.

Lyell was also a friend of Darwin's closest colleagues, Hooker and Huxley, but unlike them he struggled to square his religious beliefs with evolution.

Lyell's acceptance of natural selection, Darwin's proposed mechanism for evolution, was equivocal, and came in the tenth edition of Principles.

In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Dennett writes that evolution can account for the origin of morality.

Darwin's five theories of evolution.

Darwin's book did not address the question of human evolution, saying only that " Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history ".

The greatest change was the widespread acceptance of evolution as the mechanism of biological diversity and species formation, following the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Agassiz is remembered today for his theories on ice ages, and for his resistance to Charles Darwin's theories on evolution, which he kept up his entire life.

Groups opposing certain generally accepted scientific views on evolution, second-hand smoke, AIDS, and other politically contentious scientific matters argue that PC is responsible for the failure of their perspectives to receive a fair public hearing ; thus, in Lamarck's Signature: How Retrogenes are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm, Assoc.

The second important process is the theory of evolution by Darwin in mid-century ( which decisively influenced the work of Ratzel, who had academic training as a zoologist and was a follower of Darwin's ideas ) which meant an important impetus in the development of Biogeography.

Four of the Darwin's finches | 14 finch species found on the Galápagos Islands | Galápagos Archipelago, are thought to have evolved by an adaptive radiation that diversified their beak shapes to adapt them to different food sources.

Attempts to test Darwin's remains at the Westminster Abbey by using modern PCR techniques were met with a refusal by the Abbey's curator.

The possibility of linking humans with earlier apes by descent only became clear after 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

However, many of Darwin's early supporters ( such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Lyell ) did not agree that the origin of the mental capacities and the moral sensibilities of humans could be explained by natural selection.

Darwin's initial model of heredity was adopted by, and then heavily modified by, his cousin Francis Galton, who laid the framework for the biometric school of heredity.

Intelligent Design ( again ), by H. Allen Orr ( review of Darwin's Black Box )

Studies of Charles Darwin's notebooks have shown that Darwin arrived separately at the idea of natural selection which he set out in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, but it has been speculated that he may have had some half-forgotten memory from his time as a student in Edinburgh of ideas of selection in nature as set out by Hutton, and by William Charles Wells and Patrick Matthew who had both been associated with the city before publishing their ideas on the topic early in the 19th century.

Darwin's view, that early embryonic stages are similar to the same embryonic stage of related species but not to the adult stages of these species, has been confirmed by modern evolutionary developmental biology.

Thus punctuated equilibrium contradicts some of Darwin's ideas regarding the specific mechanisms of evolution, but generally accords with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.

In the early 20th century, many anthropologists accepted and taught the belief that biologically distinct races were isomorphic with distinct linguistic, cultural, and social groups, while popularly applying that belief to the field of eugenics, in conjunction with a practice that is now called scientific racism. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was co-opted by the budding eugenics movement to justify systematic population and racial planning in the early 20th century.

The three-spined sticklebacks, freshwater fishes, that have been studied by Dolph Schluter ( who received his Ph. D. for his work on Darwin's finches with Peter J.

( eventually Murray paid £ 180 to Darwin for the 1st edition and by Darwin's death in 1882 the book was in its 6th edition, earning Darwin nearly £ 3000.