Summary of Jerry A. Coyne's Why Evolution Is True

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The argument that nature is the work of a watchmaker, and that all organisms are well-adapted, is both commonsensical and ancient. It was most famously expressed by the eighteenth-century English philosopher William Paley.
#2 The modern theory of evolution is easy to understand. It states that life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species that lived more than 3. 5 billion years ago. The mechanism for most evolutionary change is natural selection.
#3 The third part of evolutionary theory is the idea of gradualism. It takes many generations to produce a substantial evolutionary change, such as the evolution of birds from reptiles.
#4 The evolutionary tree shown in figure 1 illustrates the relationships between birds and reptiles. When the common ancestor of these two groups split, two populations of a single reptilian species began to evolve slight differences from each other. These differences grew larger over time, and the two populations evolved sufficient genetic difference that they could not interbreed.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Spirituality
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 22 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798350024715
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Jerry A. Coyne's Why Evolution Is True
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The argument that nature is the work of a watchmaker, and that all organisms are well-adapted, is both commonsensical and ancient. It was most famously expressed by the eighteenth-century English philosopher William Paley.

#2

The modern theory of evolution is easy to understand. It states that life on earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species that lived more than 3. 5 billion years ago. The mechanism for most evolutionary change is natural selection.

#3

The third part of evolutionary theory is the idea of gradualism. It takes many generations to produce a substantial evolutionary change, such as the evolution of birds from reptiles.

#4

The evolutionary tree shown in figure 1 illustrates the relationships between birds and reptiles. When the common ancestor of these two groups split, two populations of a single reptilian species began to evolve slight differences from each other. These differences grew larger over time, and the two populations evolved sufficient genetic difference that they could not interbreed.

#5

The history of life is a tree, with every species originating from a single trunk. If life began with one species and split into millions of descendant species through a branching process, it follows that every pair of species shares a common ancestor somewhere in the past.

#6

The nested hierarchy of life is an example of how evolution produces a hierarchical grouping of features, and thus of species containing these features. It is not expected under a creationist explanation of life, because organisms would not have common ancestry but would simply result from an instantaneous creation of forms designed de novo to fit their environments.

#7

The fifth part of evolutionary theory is natural selection, which explains apparent design in nature by a purely materialistic process. It explains how organisms become well adapted to their environments and way of life.

#8

There is a difference between what you would expect to see if organisms were designed versus if they evolved by natural selection. Natural selection is not a master engineer, but a tinkerer. It does not produce the absolute perfection achievable by a designer starting from scratch, but rather the best it can do with what it has to work with.

#9

The design of an organism is a compromise between different adaptations. Natural selection does not produce perfection, but only improvements over what came before. Other processes can cause evolutionary change, such as simple random changes in the proportion of genes caused by the fact that different families have different numbers of offspring.

#10

The six parts of evolutionary theory are: speciation, common ancestry, evolution, mutation, natural selection, and the theory of gravity. The word theory in science means something completely different than in common usage, and it conveys far more assurance and rigor than a simple guess.

#11

A theory is more than just a speculation about how things are: it is a well-thought-out group of propositions meant to explain facts about the real world. A theory is considered scientific when it is testable and makes verifiable predictions.

#12

Evolution is a theory that was first proposed by Darwin in 1859, and since then has graduated to facthood as more and more supporting evidence has piled up. It is still called a theory, but it is a theory that is also a fact.

#13

The theory of evolution makes many predictions that are clear and bold. It can be supported by what I call retrodictions, which are facts and data that aren’t necessarily predicted by the theory of evolution but make sense only in light of it.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

The story of life on earth is written in the rocks. Paleontologists have worked tirelessly to piece together the tangible historical evidence for evolution: the fossil record.

#2

The fossil record is incomplete. It only contains evidence of 0. 1 percent to 1 percent of all species, and many amazing creatures must have existed that are forever lost to us.

#3

The fossil record was originally put in order not by evolutionists but by geologists, who were also creationists. They ordered the different layers of rocks based on common sense. But this tells you only the relative ages of rocks, not their actual ages.

#4

The reliability of radiometric dating is often attacked by saying that the different radioisotopes in a rock decay in different ways, and that they wouldn’t give consistent dates if decay rates changed. But scientists have found a way to check the accuracy of radiometric dating that involves biology.

#5