How the Theories of Darwin and Gould Revolutionized the World

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Naman Tariq
Cos 50
Professor Isaac
Reaction Paper
The theories of Darwin and Gould revolutionized the world. People began to think more logical about human origin and the development of human over time. Darwin’s article “The Origin of the Species, The Descent of Man and Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man provides great example of natural selection, and how the environment and the conditions can change an organism physically and mentally. The movie Dinosaur is a great kid’s movie that both ties the ideas of both these scholars together and in other ways contradicts their theories. In the book “The Origins of Species, The Descent of Man,” Darwin gives his incite on human variation and evolution. Darwin believed that man is descended from some less highly-organized form. Charles Darwin quotes” I believe that animals are descended from at most only four or five progenitors”(Darwin 217). He believes that all living things have a lot in common and therefore they all came from the same origin. Darwin acknowledged the similarities in the embryonic development between man and the lower animal; along with their “chemical composition, their cellular structure, their laws of growth, and their liability in injurious influences” (Darwin 217); and used it as a solid reason to conclude that at one point in life there weren’t many forms of life and through time began to evolve into newer and different species due to natural selection. Natural selection is a process resulting in the survival of those individuals from a population of animals or plants that are best adapted to the prevailing environmental conditions. Darwin believed that it leads to the improvement of each creature and in some ways makes them more advanced. In the “Mismeasure of Man,” Stephen Jay Gould proposed that much of the research was based more upon the racial and social prejudices of the researchers than upon their scientific objectivity. Scientist basically made up a conclusion before...
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