Again, Matthews takes a tentative view of natural selection. But does this mean that Matthews didn believe that evolution had occurred?
Ever since the first appearance of life on earth a process of evolution from comparatively simple to more complex organisms has been going on. [Matthews 1975, 114] So while Matthews seems to have had some doubts about natural selection in certain instances, he expresses no doubts about the reality of evolution. Regarding the evolution of the mammals, he wrote that: Long before the dinosaurs had achieved their evolutionary success another group of reptiles, the synapsids, had appeared, evolved during forty million years into a variety of forms, and then had all but disappeared by the time the great dinosaur dynasty was coming into power. They left only a tenuous thread of descendants, small and inconspicuous creatures leading obscure lives in out of the way places during the million centuries of dinosaur dominance. Yet they were destined, insignificant though they seemed, to replace the once dominant reptiles. The synapsids are known also as the ‘mammal-like reptiles’, and in the evolut
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