BIOL 3040 : Exam 1
Document Summary
What is evolution: the process of descent with modification that is responsible for the origin, maintenance, and diversity of life. Early evolutionary thought: all of the knowledge that lead in to darwin developing the theory of natural selection. Supernatural cause of everything (early bc: the gods are responsible for this and that for luck for everything, the initial explanation for why the world is the way it is, is because god made it that way. Anaximander (610-546 bc: philosophy of natural world driven by physical rather than supernatural actions, important: because it was the birth of the scientific method and started the trend of explaining the world based on natural (observable) phenomena. Led to the maturation of the scientific method. Scientific method: make observations, formulate hypotheses, derive predictions, experimentally test. Hypothesis: a testable suggested explanation of a phenomenon. Theory: a broad explanation of an observation or observations. Differs from a hypothesis in: scope, evidence, explanatory power.
