![]() The Scala Naturae is a philosophical view of nature attributed to Aristotle in Ancient Greece. We no longer accept Earth-centered astronomy, flat-earth models, or the idea that disease is based on imbalances in bodily “humors”.īut there is still one domain that we cling to despite all the evidence to the contrary – a view of nature known as the Scala Naturae or Great Chain of Being. Over time, the dynamic self-correcting nature of science has led us to an increasingly better understanding of the world. And despite persecution from the Catholic Church, Galileo’s model of the universe eventually won out. But scientific data kept showing that this view was indisputably incorrect. Indeed, it could be quite dangerous to suggest otherwise. ![]() However, for another 2,000 years it was still mostly agreed that the Earth was at the center of the universe and that all heavenly bodies revolved around it. Observations – by sailors, for example, who could watch mountains slowly sinking below the horizon as they sailed from shore – gradually disproved that notion. In this article I propose a tree-like "symbiogenesis, natural selection, and dynamic Earth (synade)-model" of macroevolution that is based on these novel facts and data.Three thousand years ago, in Ancient Egypt, people generally believed that the sun god Ra rose from the darkness each day and rode across the sky. As a result, these geologic processes destroyed numerous populations of organisms, and produced the environmental conditions for new species of animals, plants and microbes to adapt and evolve. At the same time, it created mountain ranges, deep oceans, novel freshwater habitats, and deserts. Over millions of years, plate tectonics and hence the "dynamic Earth" has caused destructive volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. The resulting theory of plate tectonics is now the principal organizing concept of geology. In 1929, Alfred Wegener published his theory of continental drift, which was later corroborated, modified and extended. According to the symbiogenesis-scenario, eukaryotic cells evolved on a static Earth from archaic prokaryotes via the fusion and subsequent cooperation of certain microbes. In 1910, Constantin Mereschkowsky proposed an alternative, "anti-selectionist" concept of biological evolution, which became known as the symbiogenesis-theory. In this article I argue that Darwin was still influenced by "ladder thinking", a theological view that prevailed throughout the 19th century and is also part of Ernst Haeckel's famous Oak tree (of Life) of 1866, which is, like Darwin's scheme, static. This insight of 1859 was based on his now firmly corroborated proposals of common ancestry and natural selection. Charles Darwin is usually credited with the establishment of a branched evolutionary "Tree of Life". 1850 (Charles Bonnet, Jean Lamarck and others). Despite these insights, the Bible-based concept of the so-called "ladder of life" or Scala Naturae, i.e., the idea that all living beings can be viewed as representing various degrees of "perfection", with humans at the very top of this biological hierarchy, was popular among naturalists until ca. ![]() However, the evolution of phenotypic features is not predictable, and biologists no longer use terms such as "primitive" or "perfect organisms". 3500 million year long evolutionary history. All living beings on Earth, from bacteria to humans, are connected through descent from common ancestors and represent the summation of their corresponding, ca.
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