New Evolution Theory Biology Letters On Darwin Debate

By: Mary Smith
08/25/2010 08:20 AM ET

New evolution theory biology letters on Darwin debate. A new study on the biology challenges Charles Darwin’s evolution theory by letters submitted. The evolution theory and biology leaps has been a hot debate for several decades.

Evolution has always been a hot topic across colleges around the country. Most people believe that biochemistry and fossils support the theory by Charles Darwin. It’s a theory that creatures have evolved to their current forms over the course of Terran life’s existence over the last few billion years.

A controversial new study takes a crack at the topic of major evolutionary leaps. Darwin theorized that competition was the driving factor in dramatic leaps. However, PhD student Sarda Sahney of the University of Bristol says living space is the primary driving force. Sahney and her group’s principal investigator, Professor Mike Benton, examined the fossil record. They came to the conclusion that organisms made the biggest leaps when they were exposed to an uncolonized space — somewhere devoid of competition.

“Competition did not play a big role in the overall pattern of evolution. For example, even though mammals lived beside dinosaurs for 60 million years, they were not able to out-compete the dominant reptiles. But when the dinosaurs went extinct, mammals quickly filled the empty niches they left and today mammals dominate the land,” Professor Mike Benton said.

Professor Stephen Stearns, a senior evolutionary biologist at Yale University disagrees with the report’s assessment that competition was less important than space in the evolutionary process. He states, “To give one example, if the reptiles had not been competitively superior to the mammals during the Mesozoic (era), then why did the mammals only expand after the large reptiles went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic?” While this debate has been going on for generations, it will go on for generations to come.

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