Researched
Evolution by natural selection
Species change over generations because individuals that fit their environment leave more offspring.
Open in the interactive tree →Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species on 24 November 1859, independently of Alfred Russel Wallace, drawing on animal breeding, fossils and a five-year voyage. It explained the unity and diversity of life with one mechanism and turned biology into a historical science. Genetics later supplied the missing mechanism of inheritance, and evolution still guides work from antibiotic resistance to protein engineering.
Prerequisites
- Farming (Neolithic Revolution)~9500 BC
- Scientific Method~1600-1620
- Linnaeus and classification1735Darwin built on the nested classification of living things
- Geology and deep time1788Darwin needed the vast age of the Earth that geology (Hutton, Lyell) established
Unlocks
- Genetics and plant breeding1866
- Ecology and the ecosystem1935
- Modern evolutionary synthesis1942
- Honeybee dance language decoded1946-1967
- Songbirds learn their songs1954-1970
- Endosymbiosis1967
- Three domains of life1977
- Asgard Archaea & Complex Life2015–2020
- Antibiotic resistanceopen
- Halting mass extinctionopen
- Origin of Human Languageopen
- Origin of lifeopen