The term evolution (literally ‘unfolding’) refers to change through time. Astronomers speak of stellar evolution when describing the explosive changes predicted for stars; anthropologists who document changes in pottery types of a settled people may speak about the evolution of cultural artifacts. To most of us, however, evolution refers to changes in living organisms over the course of Earth's history and is therefore synonymous with organic evolution .
There are an estimated 30 million extant species of organisms, and virtually all biologists agree that they are products of evolution. That is, based on the extraordinary conservation of the carbon chemistry of which life is composed, biologists recognize the common ancestry of all life on Earth. They agree that the fossil record shows clearly that different types of life (populations of organisms) appeared, extended to various localities, and became extinct, and so changed through time. They also concur that life has expanded from the...
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Bibliography
Margulis, L., and Fester, R. (eds), 1991. Symbiosis as Source of Evolutionary Innovation: Speciation and Morphogenesis. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 454 pp.
Margulis, L., 1993. Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial Communities in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons (2nd edn). New York: W.H. Freeman, 452 pp.
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© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Sagan, D., Margulis, L. (1999). Evolution, natural selection . In: Environmental Geology. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_132
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4494-1_132
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