Evo­lu­tion or cre­ation? That’s no ques­tion at all!

(Moos)

As Nature pro­vides 15 gems of evi­dence on evo­lu­tion by nat­ural selection.


What is there to explore? Read Stephen Moss’ arti­cle


M
odern evo­lu­tion­ary the­ory pro­vides a robust expla­na­tion for how life on earth evolved over time through the pass­ing on of traits from one gen­er­a­tion to the next. It is one of the most stud­ied, tested, and accepted the­o­ries in sci­ence. Cre­ation­ist attempts to chal­lenge evo­lu­tion have been com­mon over the last 100 years, but recent and dan­ger­ous chal­lenges have come mainly from the intel­li­gent design movement.
Intel­li­gent design is based on the con­cept of “irre­ducible com­plex­ity”: an idea that some struc­tures found in nature are too com­plex to be explained by nat­ural selec­tion and are best explained by some intel­li­gent cause. The focus of the move­ment is on man­dat­ing that intel­li­gent design be taught as an alter­na­tive to evo­lu­tion in the sci­ence class­room. To do this, it relies on cre­at­ing false con­tro­versy and mis­con­cep­tions about sci­ence — espe­cially evo­lu­tion. The move­ment has been suc­cess­ful at gain­ing sup­port from many com­mu­nity lead­ers, includ­ing politi­cians and school board members.
A par­tic­u­larly dis­turb­ing ele­ment of the intel­li­gent design move­ment is the attempt to cir­cum­vent laws pro­tect­ing sep­a­ra­tion of church and state by claim­ing that it is a sci­en­tific the­ory not a reli­gious belief.

(source: Union of Con­cerned Sci­en­tists)

How evo­lu­tion works

The mech­a­nisms of evo­lu­tion explained in one video.

The the­ory of evo­lu­tion explains how the enor­mous vari­ety of life could come into exis­tence. How it is pos­si­ble for prim­i­tive life forms to spawn the mil­lions of dif­fer­ent crea­tures, that exist today. Unfor­tu­nately, evo­lu­tion is often mis­un­der­stood, because it’s mech­a­nisms seem counter intu­itive. This video, by using visu­al­i­sa­tions and info­graph­ics, may help you under­stand the com­plex­ity of the mech­a­nisms of evolution.


(Source: Kurzge­sagt YouTube channel)



Explore Tree of Life learn more about evolution Check out the open-access resource Tree of Life

Goal: 7000 tigers in the wild

Tiger range countries map

Tiger map” (CC BY 2.5) by Sander­son et al., 2006.

about zoos and their mis­sion regard­ing breed­ing endan­gered species, nature con­ser­va­tion, bio­di­ver­sity and edu­ca­tion, which of course relates to the evo­lu­tion of species.
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