The Greatest Show from Darwin-20-Millions of years

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Millions of years of evolution.

Proof the theory of random mutations relies on a grandiose time interval. Today, almost every schoolboy knows that the Earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago. It took about a billion years for life to be born, and the same amount for oxygen photosynthesis to start. As a result, the first algae appeared just over a billion years ago. And about five hundred million years ago there was a Cambrian explosion, during which, of course, nothing exploded, but invertebrates rapidly evolved into vertebrates. After that, several global catastrophes occurred, which led to equally global extinctions and revivals, as a result of which the Earth was filled with all the diversity of living beings that we see today mostly in zoos and television programs.

It is said that Darwin himself believed that a hundred million years would be enough for all about all evolution. Meanwhile, by the time he created the theory of his own name, with the age of the Earth, not everything was as good as it is now.

The first more or less scientifically based estimate of the age of the Earth was made in 1775 by the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon. He turned out enough 74 thousand 832 years. For the next hundred years, scientists put forward various hypotheses, until in 1862, the British physicist Lord Kelvin drew a line under all these hypotheses at a meeting of the Edinburgh Royal Society. Like Buffon, Lord Kelvin believed that the Earth was originally in a molten state, but it turned out to be significantly older – somewhere from 20 to 400 million years. Subsequently, he rechecked his calculations, adjusting the initial estimate to a range of 20-40 million years.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Rutherford estimated the age of rocks using radioactive decay. He got the same 40 million years. After that, the calculation methods were rapidly improved, until finally, in 1956, the American researcher Claire Patterson calculated the age of the Earth at 4.55 ± 0.07 billion years.

Let me remind you, "The Origin of Species" was published on November 24, 1859. Just three years before Kelvin's statement at a meeting of the Edinburgh Royal Society. It is no exaggeration to say that we should be grateful to Charles Darwin not only for his brilliant theory, but also for the fact that scientists have finally taken a closer look at the problem of the age of the Earth.
Just imagine what a gift of deep foresight the creator of the theory of random mutations must have had at a time when the age of the Earth, according to general opinion, was so unacceptably small for the realization of even a tiny fraction of such accidents. At a time when scientific thought could not yet confidently determine whether to measure the age of the Earth in hundreds of thousands of years or still in millions, there was a genius who claimed that if you add a little time, then everything can easily be explained by chance.

Evaluate the degree of scientific courage when, even half a century after the publication of the immortal theory, thanks to the most advanced method of radio decay for that time, Rutherford managed to give Mother Earth some four tens of millions of years, of which, as we understand, the lion's share went to the formation of the planet itself, when there were no tolerable conditions for life. The remaining term is negligible even by Darwin's own standards.

The first primates, as is now known, appeared more than sixty million years ago. It turns out that only our tailed ancestors took almost twice as long as science had at its disposal in the first half of the 20th century for the entire evolution. And what do you want to do with amoebas, dinosaurs and other brush-fangs? Where to put them? After all, whatever one may say, but in order for natural selection to be able to generate all of them from randomly variable unicellular, he needed time for this. And preferably more.

Despite the fact that Darwin's theory met with serious criticism at first, it soon managed to gain worldwide scientific recognition. I can't help but wonder how scientific minds, having such an insignificant period for the realization of even the smallest fraction of the accidents necessary for evolution, came to almost universal recognition of the idea itself?

Okay, Darwin is a genius, but what about everyone else? They can't all be geniuses!

Even if not everyone immediately recognized Darwin's theory. The same Kelvin stubbornly believed that there simply would not have been enough time to implement natural selection. Now we know for sure that he was right and forty million years is a joke to the chickens.

However, people like Kelvin are rather an exception. Few people are now familiar with the expression "Russia is the second homeland of Darwinism." And this, by the way, was almost a cliche in the Russian-language literature of the second half of the XIX century. And, although, like most other cliches, it only partially reflects reality, nevertheless, the evolutionary theory really soon captured the minds, becoming almost the most important component of the worldview of the Russian intelligentsia.

"Works of Ch . Darwin's "The Origin of Species by Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favorable Races in the Struggle for Life" (1859) and "The Origin of Man and Sexual Selection" (1871) were at the center of acute socio-political, philosophical, religious and ethical discussions, turning for many into sacred scripture, requiring or worship by adherents, or unconditional condemnation and "burning", according to conservatives. From the Russian radicals of the 1860s (P.L. Lavrov, V.A. Zaitsev, N.D. Nozhkin, etc.) and liberals (A.S. Famintsina and K.A. Timiryazev) the tradition has gone to see Darwinism as the natural-scientific basis for the transformation of society."

As you understand, after the revolution, Darwin's theory took a step even further: into the people, into schools, it became a truly sacred scripture - an ideological basis for fighting the church, well, with everything else that was associated with the past.

The struggle over the evolutionary theory caused many heated scientific disputes, and in the Soviet Union cost the lives of hundreds of biologists. Almost all these disputes have already been forgotten, theories too. And only Darwin's theory, like the phoenix bird, went through all the troubles, becoming an internationally recognized indisputable truth.

* - I apologizes for my English. I would be grateful for the corrections.

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