In 1859, when Darwin published his most famous book: Origin of Life, it started the era of the theory of evolution. As we know, Darwinism proposes that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called NATURAL SELECTION. According to that theory, life developed from a single common ancestor and evolved gradually into a multitude of different species through the chain of small changes under the varying environment condition.
That means the differences between species and the increasing complexity in the organism must occur in parallel over time. In short, life must be like a tree, with a common root and then split into many different branches. Thus, in 1866, Ernst Haeckel introduced the phylogenetic tree, or the tree of life. Until now, the theory about the existence of tree of life is still strong in most people thought. But in fact, is this the phylogenetic tree really exist? If not, is Darwin wrong?
The key point for the theory of the tree of life is homology. In 1848, Richard Owen introduce the term Homology to refer the structural similarities between two species that is not functionally necessary.
[...] Most fossils form from burial of ancient living species in sediment; soft parts are more often consumed or decomposed but may leave imprints if buried rapidly. According to the record of fossil reading, we can see the connection between the extant species and ancients species, thus find out the evolution and the connection of all living species. Let's take Horse and Ginkgo as example for the evolution of living species. The horse (Equus ferus caballus belong to family Equidae) is one of species that had evolves over time in anatomy quite significantly. The evolution of horse was happened in the Cenozoic Era. [...]
[...] This little animal had a "doggish" look with an arched back, short neck, short snout, short legs, long tail and vestigial toes. Hyracotherium walked on pads and had a feet were like a dog's padded feet, except the small "hoofies" on each toe instead of claws. In the early middle Eocene (about 55 million years ago), a close relative with Hyracotherium, Orohippus was found with a look resemble to Hyracotherium with slimmer body, longer legs, more grinding teeth and the vestigial toes was vanished. [...]
[...] If the tree of life were real, it would just be real for the time after Cambrian Periods, so is Darwinian Theory because the fossils recording, the existence of Living Fossils and the Cambrian Explosion are the most truthful evidence to reject Darwinian Theory. But actually, this doesn't mean Natural Selection is wrong, because even the fossil recording about the evolution of most living species, especially the evolution of Homo sapiens or the extinction of Dinosaurs, this is true to say that under the environment conditions, structural and functional of body plan has changed gradually to help the organism survival through all the extinction events. However, life is not going in the straight line gradually like that. [...]
[...] A species ability to adapt is the essence of evolution. Overall, based on the Theory of Evolution, all species these days are evolved from only on species which is the root in the Tree of Life. Throughout over time, this ancestor evolved to many, many species with different time and environment conditions. Thus, the number of species would increase follow the geometric progression and between two branches of tree (in horizontal) should not have very close relative. However, life is not easy like we thought. [...]
[...] Available from: http://www.godslasteraar.org/assets/ebooks/Hunt_Kathleen_Horse_Evolution.pdf Hsu, Karen; Kang, Myun; Lavarias, Amy & Prabaker, Kavitha (2000) The Cambrian Periods, University of California Museum of Paleontology, USA. Available from: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/cambrian/camb.html Levasseur Anthony; Pontarotti Pierre Pontarotti, Poch Olivier and Thompson Julie D.(2008) Strategies for Reliable Exploitation of Evolutionary Concepts in High Throughput Biology in Evolutionary Bioinformatics, France. Meyer, Stephen C., Nelson, P. A. and Chien Paul (2001) The Cambrian Explosion: Biology's Big Bang Wachman, Monica. What is Living fossil? Available from: http://www.ehow.com/facts_5799329_living-fossil_.html Woese C. (2000), Interpreting the universal phylogenetic tree, PNAS 97(15) 8396. Available from: http://www.pnas.org.cgi.reprint/97/15/8392.pdf Zhou, Z. [...]
APA Style reference
For your bibliographyOnline reading
with our online readerContent validated
by our reading committee
