Even in ancient times, people found the remains of strange animals. The giant bones of dinosaurs, skulls of saber-toothed tigers and mammoths suggested that earlier the earth was inhabited by several other animals and plants than those that we can observe now. In 1575, a scientist from France B. Palissi compiled an inventory of the found fossils, comparing them with the body structure of modern organisms. Being unfamiliar with the concept of what evolution is, he nevertheless established that the remains do not belong to any of the living forms of organics. Thus, he concluded that biological species are not immutable.
Darwin did not discover this phenomenon in the 19th century, but tried to explain what evolution is and how it occurs. His merit lies in the fact that he put forward and proved the theory of natural selection. With changes in climate and the environment, and there are many such periods in the history of the globe, the process of screening of weak species that have not adapted to changing conditions, giving place to new and more successful life forms. The evolutionary process operates within a species when a stronger individual leaves offspring after itself, and a weaker one dies without ever having to continue the genus.
What is evolution? Before Darwin, scientists who were engaged in embryogenesis knew about this, that is, they studied the development of the fetus. The Latin term evolutio (deployment) was opposed to another Latin word, revolutio (coup). Watching how the gills of a human embryo give way to lungs, evolutionists believed that the structures of the life phases in a fertilized egg were laid in place initially and only gradually manifested, and the revolutionists defended the opposite point of view: the embryo was transformed from scratch.
However, these were disputes in the scientific world, far from everyday life. While the theorists of embryogenesis were breaking spears, Darwin publicly declared what evolution is in nature. He proved that all life on Earth is developing from simple to complex, and that in the history of our planet there are many dead-end branches that have died out, failing to adapt to changing conditions. This caused a storm of indignation among creationists who believed that God created all living things during the days of the creation of the world, and in the form in which we observe today.
The evolution of the organic world unequivocally indicated that man also stood out from anthropoid primates by natural selection. Now, in the 21st century, no one disputes that evolution is a proven fact. The fossil record — strata of the earth — shows that amphibians appeared in Devon, reptiles in Carbon, and animals in Triassic. Not only that: now, in a globalized world, when animals and plants are artificially relocated to other parts of the planet, under conditions of human warming and economic activity, we can observe that natural selection continues to operate.
A superficial acquaintance with the history of mankind gives rise to the belief that evolutionary changes are also taking place among the species of Homo sapiens as a community. Immediately after the Darwinian discoveries, the theory that the evolution of society follows similar laws as in the wild, penetrated the science of sociology. O. Comte believed that the main parameter of social development is knowledge and scientific and technological progress. G. Spencer, on the other hand, saw evolution in the complexity of the structures of society, where the rights of the individual play a great role. And the determining factor in social change in Marxist theory is productive relations.