Concept
Orthogenesis
Related concepts (28)
History of evolutionary thought
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity—in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Church Fathers as well as in medieval Islamic science.
Omega Point
The Omega Point is a theorized future event in which the entirety of the universe spirals toward a final point of unification. The term was invented by the French Jesuit Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955). Teilhard argued that the Omega Point resembles the Christian Logos, namely Christ, who draws all things into himself, who in the words of the Nicene Creed, is "God from God", "Light from Light", "True God from True God", and "through him all things were made".
Teleology in biology
Teleology in biology is the use of the language of goal-directedness in accounts of evolutionary adaptation, which some biologists and philosophers of science find problematic. The term teleonomy has also been proposed. Before Darwin, organisms were seen as existing because God had designed and created them; their features such as eyes were taken by natural theology to have been made to enable them to carry out their functions, such as seeing.
Mutationism
Mutationism is one of several alternatives to evolution by natural selection that have existed both before and after the publication of Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. In the theory, mutation was the source of novelty, creating new forms and new species, potentially instantaneously, in sudden jumps. This was envisaged as driving evolution, which was thought to be limited by the supply of mutations. Before Darwin, biologists commonly believed in saltationism, the possibility of large evolutionary jumps, including immediate speciation.
Theistic evolution
Theistic evolution (also known as theistic evolutionism or God-guided evolution) is a view that God acts and creates through laws of nature. It posits that the concept of God is compatible with the findings of modern science, including evolution. Theistic evolution is not in itself a scientific theory, but includes a range of views about how science relates to religious beliefs and the extent to which God intervenes. It rejects the strict creationist doctrines of special creation, but can include beliefs such as creation of the human soul.
Transmutation of species
Transmutation of species and transformism are unproven 18th and 19th-century evolutionary ideas about the change of one species into another that preceded Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. The French Transformisme was a term used by Jean Baptiste Lamarck in 1809 for his theory, and other 18th and 19th century proponents of pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas included Denis Diderot, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Erasmus Darwin, Robert Grant, and Robert Chambers, the anonymous author of the book Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.
Lamarckism
Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime. It is also called the inheritance of acquired characteristics or more recently soft inheritance. The idea is named after the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who incorporated the classical era theory of soft inheritance into his theory of evolution as a supplement to his concept of orthogenesis, a drive towards complexity.
Modern synthesis (20th century)
The modern synthesis was the early 20th-century synthesis of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on heredity into a joint mathematical framework. Julian Huxley coined the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. The synthesis combined the ideas of natural selection, Mendelian genetics, and population genetics. It also related the broad-scale macroevolution seen by palaeontologists to the small-scale microevolution of local populations.
Philosophie zoologique
Philosophie zoologique ("Zoological Philosophy, or Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals") is an 1809 book by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in which he outlines his pre-Darwinian theory of evolution, part of which is now known as Lamarckism. In the book, Lamarck named two supposed laws that would enable animal species to acquire characteristics under the influence of the environment. The first law stated that use or disuse would cause body structures to grow or shrink over the generations.
Teleological argument
The teleological argument (from τέλος; also known as physico-theological argument, argument from design, or intelligent design argument) is an argument for the existence of God or, more generally, that complex functionality in the natural world which looks designed is evidence of an intelligent creator. The earliest recorded versions of this argument are associated with Socrates in ancient Greece, although it has been argued that he was taking up an older argument.