Could someone explain the theory of evolution?
Evolution is the idea that life started out small, like bacteria, but over time with breeding and genetics that life became multi-cellular (being composed of more than one cell), and became fish-creatures who over a larger period of time formed little legs like a tadpole and crawled out of the sea. Take note that it wasn’t an instantaneous thing: this occurred over thousands of years. Eventually, a great diversity of animals came from the tadpole-ancestor, and the Earth was populated by all kinds of creatures. Que Dinosaur age, Ice age, and eventually the Age of Mammals, where we came along, evolving from primates in Africa. Hope that helped!
This is a good resource for learning about biological evolution: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/ In the future, you may want to post your science questions in the science section. You’ll get a lot of static here that might leave you more confused and with more false information than when you arrived.
The Theory of Evolution is Natural Selection, wikipedia it, its fine, wikipedia is a reliable sources, post docs edit it all the time. To contribute, the definition of biological evolution is – The change of allele frequency in a population over generations. Alleles to put it simply are specific genes, a population is a particular grouping of a particular species and I expect you’re smart enough to get the rest. I suggest The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I don’t suggest any of this other books, they’re obscenely un-science based and a waste of his mind on useless junk that doesn’t benefit society.
I recommend Darwin’s original book, On the Origin of Species. It is actually quite readable, and it goes step by step very carefully explaining all the observations and reasoning involved. Details of the theory have evolved over the years (no pun intended); almost any book by Stephen Jay Gould is a fascinating explanation of some modern aspect of evolution.
