Take 5: 12/2/11 Explain Redi’s experiment and what did it prove? What did Pasteur discover in his experiments? What is spontaneous generation?

Charles Darwin, a naturalist

Excerpt from Evolutionary Dynamics In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, Charles Darwin embarked on a his journey around the world. He gazed at the breath-taking diversity of tropical flora and fauna, collected creepy-crawlies in Brazil, and witnessed genocide in Argentina.

Excerpt from Evolutionary Dynamics He experience the effects of devastating earthquake into Chile that raised the South American Continent. He led an expedition into the Andes mountains and discovered marine fossils at high altitude.

Excerpt from Evolutionary Dynamics He paid little attention to the which finches came from which islands in the Galapagos and ate most of the delicious turtles he had gathered on his way home across the Pacific…Darwin returned to England’s shores after five years, having collected six-thousand specimens that would require decades of analysis by an army of experts.

Darwin’s Voyage on the HMS Beagle

Darwin Darwin spent the next 20 years sorting, identifying and analyzing his data. Charles Darwin did not invent the concept of evolution. When he was a student in Edinburgh in the late 1820’s, evolution was already the talk of the town. Darwin was also a keen observer of animal breeders.

Darwin’s Pigeons Darwin bred domestic pigeons. He also gained insight into the mechanism that determines which organisms survive in nature.

Darwin’s Pigeons Darwin observed that traits of individuals vary in populations By breeding pigeons with desirable traits, Darwin produced offspring with these traits. Breeding organisms with specific traits in order to produce offspring with identical traits is called artificial selection.

Who was Charles Darwin?

Why is evolution controversial?

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