BIOL 117 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Absolute Dating, Geologic Time Scale, Special Creation
21 Aug 2016
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Document Summary
Not the 1st person to propose to change and a mechanism. Scientific theories are often comprised of two components: Process = explanation of mechanism that produces that pattern. Misconceptions about evolution often are rooted in these powerful pre- evolutionary ideas. The idea of special creation proposes: species are independent, thus unrelated, life on earth is young (6,000 years old, species are immutable. Plato claimed that every entity has a true nature or essence created by god. Aristotle: species have essences, unchanging defining properties: view held sway until the time of darwin, today, we call this typological thinking. View variations within species are unimportant or even. In a contemporary view of nature, variation is seen as important and interesting, not a defect. Aristotle classified organisms into a linear array, the great chain of being: sequence was fixed, ordered to reflect increasing complexity, humans at the top of the chain.
