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Asked by 944urak29 to anuantony, Duncan, Jayne, Katherine, Sajid on 3 Nov 2017.
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Jayne Ede answered on 3 Nov 2017:
Evolution is a fascinating topic and there is piles and piles of evidence to support it – as close to a ‘fact’ as anything in science can be! A lot of it comes from the fossil record and things that have been found out via DNA sequencing. For example, we share similar skeletons to monkeys, of course, but if you look at the bones in a whale’s flipper it looks just like the bones in our hand – minus the arm part.
Evolution works in tiny, tiny steps over a long period of time. Random mutations occur in nature, a lot of the time they’re detrimental to the organism, but occasionally they’ll make no difference and sometimes they even make the organism more suited to the environment. If an organism with a mutation can breed, it might pass on that mutation. Like blue eyes in humans. Useful mutations, like long necks (which led to giraffes) or long tongues (some butterflies) are advantageous, so it’s even more likely those animals will survive to breed and pass on their genetics.
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Duncan McNicholl answered on 4 Nov 2017:
When you have a baby, it’s half you and half the other parent, and a tiny tiny tiny bit random. That means that every generation has some people in it who have a trait that is completely new. If that’s purple eyes, probably nothing much interesting is going to happen, but if it’s being able to fly, that’s really handy, so that individual is going to do really well and probably get the chance to have lots of children of their own. If it’s something bad, like having cystic fibrosis, that individual may not even live long enough to have one baby, never mind lots.
That all means that the next generation will have more babies who can fly because they have a flying parent, and fewer babies with cf because they have a parent with cf, which means that now we as a species are developing the trait of being able to fly.As for proof, yes there’s loads as Jayne said. The coolest proof I know of is this experiment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment
There’s a bit of internet history involved here as well, where the scientist responsible explained fairly calmly to a doubter what was actually going on in the experiment. You can read their exchanges here:
http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Lenski_dialog -
Sajid Javed answered on 8 Nov 2017:
There is lots of evidence for evolution here is a link http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/the-origin-of-our-species.html. I would recommend visiting the natural history museum and the darwin centre (http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit/galleries-and-museum-map/darwin-centre.html). Charles Darwin was a scientist who described a theory for evolution in his book the origin of species over 150 years ago. Also if you look at the old £10 note he is on it!
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