[Writer Name]

[Supervisor Name]

[Subject]

[Date]

Charles Darwin and the Scopes Trial

Introduction

Since ancient times, how life originated and the emergence of the wide variety of organisms known, was a mystery which, to a lesser or greater extent, aroused curiosity of scientists. However, superstition, prejudice, religious dogmas and theories that ventured due to the inability to test them on the level of knowledge of those times, made ??the question to be often forgotten or simply be accepted the inability to trace the origins. It was not until relatively recent times when man could finally address this issue with reliable criteria and scientific knowledge sufficient to prove their hypotheses. Thus, we can state that existed before the nineteenth century various hypotheses trying to explain exactly this issue, "the origin of life on Earth." Creationist theories refer to a single event of God's creation and on the other hand, the theories of spontaneous generation who argued that the appearance of the living is produced naturally, from inert matter (Price, pp. 1663-1678).

Discussion

The first scientific contribution on the subject is the work of Oparin (1924), The origin of life on Earth, where the Russian biochemist and biologist proposes an explanation, still in force, the natural way of matter arose pre-biological forms first and then the rest of living beings. In the second aspect of the spontaneous generation of life has a convincing answer from the mid-nineteenth century. This is primarily due to Pasteur and Darwin who conducted experiments in this regard. The latter, British naturalist produced a work of vital importance (1859): The Origin of Species. Which aims to provide a scientific explanation of evolution or called "descent with modification" (a term used to explain these phenomena) (Jones, pp. 100-132).

In the late nineteenth century, the so-called Neo-Darwinism primitive, based on the principle of natural selection as the basis of evolution, in the German biologist A. Weismann one of its main exponents. This hypothesis supports the variations on which selection acts are passed according to the theories of heredity enunciated by Mendel, element that Darwin could not be resolved, because in his time were not known Austrian religious ideas. During the twentieth century, from 1930 to 1950, there developed the modern neo-Darwinian theory or synthetic theory, because it arises from the fusion of three different disciplines: genetics, systematic and paleontology (Hofstadter, pp. 100-134). The creation of this movement is marked by the appearance of three works. The first was on the genetic aspects of heredity, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937). Its author, Dobzhansky, suggests that genetic variations involved in evolution are essentially minimal and heritable, according to Mendel's theories.

The change introduced, and then matches the contributions of other scientific disciplines, is the consideration of living beings, not as isolated forms, but as participants in a population. This involves understanding the changes as gene frequency of alleles determining a specific character. If this frequency is very high in regard to population, this may involve the creation of a new species (Hawkins, pp. 55-76).

In 1859, Charles Darwin published The ...