March 6th 2018 archive

What Darwin Never Knew

How did the discovery of DNA prove that Darwin’s theory of evolution was correct and how does it change the way we view evolution today and into the future?

The theory that Darwin stated was an absurd one that everyone was skeptical about, at first. All of the living things on Earth shared a common ancestor, a prehistoric animal, the fish. Fish then evolved into all the creatures we have today. They did this through adaptation and mutation, new species blossomed as they evolved to survive the environments they were put in. Therefore, all species are related to each other because we share that common ancestor.

Once DNA was discovered, it proved that Darwin’s crazy theory, wasn’t so crazy. Darwin stated that we humans evolved from apes, and when the DNA was studied, an almost-perfect match was found between human DNA and ape DNA. We are in fact, very similar, genetically, to apes, so we must have had some state of our evolution through them. Furthermore, he was also correct about how all species were evolved from fish. When scientists discovered the Tiktaalik, a prehistoric fish, the species showed it was an underwater fish with four-legs. Therefore, we can conclude that the Tiktaalik was the transitional phase between other species and fish, and that it further explains how fish were able to get up on land, and evolve into what we are today.