%0 Journal Article
%T Evolution of the Concept of Evolution - Evolution of the Concept of Evolution - Open Access Pub
%A George Mikhailovsky
%J OAP | Home | Journal of Evolutionary Science | Open Access Pub
%D 2019
%X DOI10.14302/issn.2689-4602.jes-18-2229 If we assume that the first human cultures appeared about 6,000 years ago, pictures of the world, that they created and in which they existed, were stationary during about 97% of this time. Such pictures of the world based on its creation by this or that God and subsequent existence without essential changes. This does not mean that events have been excluded in such world. What was excluded, were the novelties, while events such as sun moving across the sky, changing seasons or reproducing the number of individuals in populations of domesticated species, were integral parts of the whole picture. Such events constantly repeated themselves that allowed Ecclesiastes to formulate his dictum: ¡°What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.¡± (Ecclesiastes, 1:9). Even appearance of the science in its contemporary sense in the seventeenth century didn¡¯t get change stationarity of the picture: physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, geology and geography didn¡¯t include notions of development or evolution in any form. Biology was the first discipline which, thanks to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, due to the rapidly accumulating paleontological data, gave rise to the very idea of evolution in the beginning of nineteens century. Then, after revealing the mechanism of this evolution by Charles Darwin in his fundamental work On the Origin of Species, the evolutionary theory became one of cornerstones of biology as a science. However, even before Darwin, Charles Lyell introduced an idea of evolution in geology. His historical book Principles of Geology inspired Darwin himself during his famous sailing aboard HMS Beagle. In the same nineteenth century, pioneer ideas of Sadi Carnot led Rudolf Clausius to formulation in 1854 the 2nd law of thermodynamic according which ¡°entropy of an isolated system, always increases over time¡±. This was the first physical law that is asymmetric relating to time, and it was remained the only one for more than a century until the discovering in 1964 the cosmic microwave background radiation. This discovery was crucial for wide acceptance of the Big Band model that considers temporal structure of our Universe as a consecutive development in time, i.e., as evolution, rather than a steady state. As a result, evolutionary idea took the central stage in astronomy and astrophysics. This drastically changed all the situation in natural sciences: if all the Universe evolves, it looked quite natural to expect that its parts are evolving, too. Almost
%U https://www.openaccesspub.org/jes/article/814