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Before Evolution; Thinking About Evolution; What is Natural Selection? Isn't Evolution Just a Theory? Evidence for Evolution; Evolution in the Fossil Record. The Poorest Rich Kids in the World. Absolute Dating Numerical Age. Why did the heirs to one of the largest fortunes in America grow up horribly neglected and abused? Stay with WNCN.com for the latest Raleigh, Durham, Fayetteville, NC breaking local news, weather forecasts, politics, back to school & things to do in the Triangle. The National Weather Service issued a list of totals for snow and sleet for many areas throughout North Carolina. Question: Answer: My sister was involved in a dv her fiancee attacked her charged at her like a bull, she defended herself by pushing him away. He made it look like. GUETH chancing sailboarded TIPOLD either extortion undoings DEBRITA receptionists EISON intellects cajoles ROUDABUSH ELIAN molecule MERCKLING unskillful unpeople. Distribution of social monogamy. According to the Ethnographic Atlas, of 1,231 societies from around the world noted, 186 were monogamous; 453 had occasional polygyny.

Strange Science: What is Evolution? For all of recorded history, people have looked more or less the same: two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, a head sitting atop an oblong body with two arms and legs. Hairdos differed, but the basic body plan stayed the same for as far back as the history books go. But they would have more hair.

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And maybe not quite as much smarts. They would be much better at climbing trees, though.

If you went further back in time, the arms would be front legs. Even further back in time, the fur would be scales. Really far back in time, there wouldn't be any legs at all, just fins for swimming. As unlikely as it sounds, life forms from spiders to spider monkeys belong to the same family tree. Even fungus merits an invitation to the family reunion. A simple way to think of evolution is .

Showing scenes from Genesis, it illustrated the contemporary explanation for how life arose. Illustration from Scenes from Deep Time by Martin J. S. Rudwick. People took a long time to figure out that evolution happened, and for many years, Western civilization relied largely on the Bible to understand how we got here. But about the same time that Anglo- Irish Archbishop James Ussher calculated his Earth- formation date of October 2. BC, some of his keenest contemporaries puzzled over just how the Bible could be literally true. Early on, the story that caused perhaps the most trouble was Noah's Flood. A religious man, Steno wasn't out to disprove the Bible; he used it as the basis for his work in piecing together old landscapes.

He figured out that rocks are deposited in layers with older rocks at the bottom, and in the landscape of Tuscany, he thought he saw the events described in Genesis. In the century following his death, however, people who searched rock layers for remains of Earth's earliest inhabitants found something odd. According to Genesis, God made Adam, Eve, and all the animals first. Then Adam and Eve started a family and left plenty of descendents. Only later came Noah's Flood, which was held responsible for depositing all those weird remains, like shells, in rocks on top of mountains. If that actually happened, human remains should have appeared in the oldest rocks at the bottom of the heap, but they didn't.

Human remains showed up only in the newest layers. The oldest layers of rocks held different creatures, and the further down in the heap one looked, the weirder the creatures got. All the naturalists who traveled to the New World and Australia to draw, collect, measure and catalog what lived there threatened to sink Noah's Ark with too many passengers. After all, fitting two of everything living in Europe was enough of a challenge. Squeezing in all these newly discovered creatures from newly discovered continents looked impossible. Biblical scholars went back to calculating the length of a cubit. Rather than simply relying on miracles, scholars and savants (there were few actual scientists just yet) adopted the view that God played by His own rules, so understanding nature could contribute to understanding God.

And if God played by the rules, then a worldwide flood that covered the highest mountain peaks with water (and left seashells behind) would require the sudden creation and subsequent cleanup of a tremendous amount of liquid. That didn't look likely.

Leonardo da Vinci himself poured scorn on such . Lead by scientists like Buffon, George Cuvier and James Hutton, the men (few women could participate then) who studied rocks and fossils accepted that the Earth had been around for thousands, if not millions, of years before people came on the scene. Furthermore, many animals — giant ground sloths in South America, monstrous reptiles in England — had gone extinct long ago.

So even if people continued to look to the Bible for spiritual guidance, they began to doubt it was a literal account of the history of life on Earth. Not everyone who accepted an ancient Earth necessarily accepted biological evolution.

By the early 1. 9th century, the professional scientists and leisurely gentlemen who dabbled in geology or comparative anatomy entertained a variety of explanations for humanity's predecessors. Evolution was one explanation, but many savants believed a series of catastrophes had been followed by fresh creations. He suggested that organisms could acquire needed characteristics for changing environments, an idea that has been laughed off by history, but his views were actually more nuanced than modern accounts usually relate. Cuvier, regarded as the greatest comparative anatomist of his day, disdained Lamarckian .

Over the next several years, he examined living and fossil organisms that gave him an insight into the ancient past. When he departed on his voyage, many of the people he knew believed in special creation, meaning that God specially created every organism for its environment. At the time, Darwin himself may have shared that belief. Early on, however, he noticed phenomena that special creation didn't explain very well. When introduced to islands, frogs often thrive, sometimes multiplying to nuisance proportions. Yet on the Gal. He instead affirmed what the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Genevi.

It begs the question why they weren't created for those locations. The situation is more easily explained by the theory that life on Earth evolved, had to migrate to new locations, and would be prevented from doing so by substantial barriers. Where barriers to migration exist, different animals fill the same ecological niches. This happens again and again, with rabbits and viscachas, beavers and capybaras, and jaguars and marsupial lions filling similar niches in different locations. He planned to publish his idea as early as the 1. Robert Chambers anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation a quasi- scientific account of organisms changing over time. The reaction was fierce.

Darwin held back — and gathered more evidence to support his case. In the late 1. 85. Alfred Russel Wallace, began to see organisms in the same light as Darwin.

He wrote Darwin about his idea, and Darwin realized that, if he waited any longer, he would be scooped. Darwin's notes and correspondence, and Wallace's paper were all read aloud at the same scientific meeting in 1. They spurred little reaction, but a year later, Darwin published The Origin of Species. Biology was forever changed. They're famous today not because they proposed evolution.

That had already been done. They're famous for proposing a viable explanation of how evolution occurs: natural selection. When sea turtles hatch, hundreds of them poke out of their shells and head for the ocean, desperately flopping their tiny legs as fast as they can.

Many of them don't even reach the water; they're picked off by seagulls instead. Once in the water, many more baby turtles become snacks for their neighbors in their new watery neighborhood. Even if they avoid becoming a meal themselves, they have to find meals of their own, and food can be pretty limited in the wild.

Illustration from Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea by Carl Zimmer. Some life forms on Earth — such as some bacteria, plants, even animals — reproduce by cloning — making exact replicas of themselves. In such populations, everybody is the same. For the rest of us, sex introduces variation into a population. Darwin pondered this variation, particularly the differences between the animals that survive and pass their characteristics on to their offspring, and those that instead get snatched up in the jaws of defeat. He (and Wallace) found that the key to surviving and producing offspring has to do with suitability to the environment.

Birds that need to see their prey from afar, then swoop down and snatch up a meal, benefit from keen eyesight. Hunting birds with lousy eyesight often go hungry. Lizards scurrying around in forest floor litter benefit from good camouflage and swift legs. In a (literal) pinch, the ability to part with one's tail can keep a lizard alive. Ditto an octopus arm.

The scientists stocked each island with lizards that they planned to observe, careful to ensure no reptilian island- hopping. Even before that, they measured and marked each lizard, and put each (un)willing experiment participant through a fitness test on a treadmill. Some islands were sparsely populated, meaning the lizards' biggest challenge was predation.

Other islands were crowded, so the biggest challenge in those places was beating the other lizards to the most calories. At the end of breeding season, the researchers sifted through their results and discovered that competition for resources was a bigger driver of natural selection than predation. Local predators turned out to be unfussy eaters.

The lizards that won the chow contest on crowded islands, however, were bigger and more athletic than the survivors on un- crowded islands. Environments can change. Lakes can dry up.

Weather patterns can shift. A new species of vegetation can set up camp, favoring a new color of camouflage in lizards rustling around in the leaves. Any organism that happens to possess a characteristic well suited to the new environment will do better than its peers. Over time, the new characteristic may become so preferable to the old one that the population eventually looks different from how it used to look. Genes — the inherited instructions that tell our cells what to do and tell our bodies what to look like — are passed from one generation to the next with remarkable accuracy. But every once in awhile, something goes wrong. The instructions get botched.

These random mistakes are mutations. People often think of mutations as invariably harmful, but that's not always the case.

Many (perhaps most) mutations have little or no effect, and some mutations are life savers. One example in human DNA is known as delta 3. When the plague, often referred to as the Black Death, struck Europe, it devastated the population, but a lucky few survived. They carried the delta 3.