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Essay on Issues of Tempo and Mode in Evolution

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There are many ways to explain how Earth and everything else came to be. Such as, Uniformitarianism, Catastrophism, Gradualism, and Punctuated Equilibrium. Generally, Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism are grouped together while Punctuated Equilibrium and Gradualism are grouped together separately from Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism. Gradualism and Punctuated Equilibrium are usually looked at through a biblical stand point rather than how Uniformitarianism and Catastrophism are looked at from the opposite view.
The theory of Uniformitarianism states that everything happens gradually and what we see now in the present time, took many years to become this way. It also has a natural law that says that what was happening before is …show more content…

Whewell was a scholar from the University of Cambridge. He used it to help explain evolution since at the time evolution was supported by Noah’s Ark. Since, Noah’s Ark was used as an explanation for mass extinction. There is also Catastrophism in this group and its explanation is that some of Earths features and events like mountains, valleys, floods, and mass extinctions were caused by very dramatic and harmful events. How it relates to Uniformitarianism is that Uniformitarianism is slow gradual changes like erosion, and can cause catastrophic events later on. Such as, glaciers melting, and forming tsunamis and floods, killing off species catastrophically. They are also much related because they relate to the idea of cause and effect. They are also basically anti-creationist and agree that many events have to happen over long periods of time not in all just one moment. However, there is also gradualism and punctuated equilibrium to support the creationist side. Gradualism and punctuated equilibrium explain how species go through evolutionary change. Gradualism is belief that changes occur, or ought to occur, slowly in the form of gradual steps, another topic related to gradualism is incrementalism. Gradualism supports how species go through evolutionary changes over short and longer periods of time. Gradualism is also very popular in politics, it is one of the defining features in conservatism and reformism,

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