Science & Religion

Natural Selection

When Charles Darwin took a voyage around the world he was struck by the number of new species he saw of familiar animals and birds. He reasoned from what he saw that the various species have not remained unaltered throughout time. He proposed a mechanism to explain this.

He said that the individuals of a species differ from each other in the degree to which they are adapted to their environment. The poorly adapted perish and the fittest survive. He called this "natural selection".

The transmission of individual characteristics from one generation to another is determined by "genes".

This copying process reduces errors in transmission from parent to child to minimal proportions.

Although strictly controlled, the copying is nevertheless subject to random changes.

This is a result of entropy.

Evolution proposes a long history of the formation of more and more complex (ordered) creatures by better adaptation to the environment. Science thus proposes a mechanism to show how life as we know it could have emerged on the Earth.