Evolution occurs in every corner of the cosmos; on Earth it fabricated the world of living beings. Just as it is true that in the center of the Sun thermonuclear reactions are responsible for generating light and heat, it is also true that living beings evolve through time.

Among scientists there is no doubt that evolution has occurred, that all species are descended from others that have already disappeared. The evolutionary process is the backbone of all biological phenomena, as summarized by the Ukrainian-born geneticist Theodosius Dobzhanzky in the maxim: “Nothing makes sense in biology except in the light of evolution”.

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And this, which is an absolute truth, includes human beings: we share with chimpanzees and bonobos an ancestor that lived about 7 million years ago, an ancestor that is much more recent than the one we have, for example, with a frog.

Extending the timeline back even further, we share with all vertebrates an ancestor that lived some 550 million years ago. That explains why animals with vertebrae have the same body plan, the same biological design.

Here the word “design” has nothing to do with the so-called theory of intelligent design that pretends to explain the world of living beings, not by the action of blind material forces, but by the intentionality of a superhuman designer intelligence. Evolutionary scholars make predictions about how organisms were the ancestors of today’s organisms; fossils and other evidence ultimately support or reject their hypotheses.

There are those who claim that evolution is only a theory, pretending to cast a shadow of doubt on the evolutionary fact. Why do such people not make the same assertion about, for example, the theory of relativity? Because they maintain that the human being is the product of a special creation and, consequently, a being that is not subject to the laws of evolutionary biology, they see in the scientific explanation of our origin a danger to their beliefs.

In science, facts are explained by resorting to theories that are experimentally contrasted to demonstrate their validity or falsity. This is how a theory becomes scientific. The history of science is full of examples of theories that ended up abandoned when tests proved them to be false.

existence of a substance called phlogiston, which was part of the composition of bodies that could burn. Experiments proved that this phlogiston did not exist.

Theories are not dogmas of faith and continually questioning them is part of the greatness of science. For years Einstein’s theory of relativity has passed all the tests to which it has been subjected, demonstrating that its basic assumptions are true. Surely, for the phenomena occurring in a black hole, relativity loses its validity and it is necessary to resort to a theory that amalgamates relativity with quantum mechanics.

Different theories have been developed to explain the phenomenon of evolution, such as that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, which, grosso modo, states that the modifications that occur in the environment force living beings to develop organs that allow them to adapt to environmental changes. Such modifications are transmitted to offspring, a process known as inheritance of acquired characters.

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Genetics proved that Lamarckism is false, just as the orthogenetic conception of evolution defended by the French Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his book The Human Phenomenon, according to which the evolutionary process goes in a straight line guided by an immaterial force towards the unfailing emergence of the human being, the omega point, proved to be false.

The universe is completely indifferent to the existence of human beings. On the contrary, we are interested in understanding how it works and we embark on the marvelous enterprise of searching for the laws that govern it, using what we have learned to manufacture all the technology that facilitates our daily life.

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace proposed a mechanism to explain the modifications that occur in living beings over millions of years: natural selection. Experiments, observations and fossils have shown that this is the fundamental mechanism of the evolutionary process. But Darwinism, like all science, changes and evolves.

When the contributions of Mendel and Darwin were combined in the thirties and forties of the last century, neo-Darwinism emerged and the explanation of evolution gained in depth and became simpler.

Without renouncing the basic principles of Darwinism, there is also the theory of punctuated equilibrium, proposed in the 1970s by paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould as an alternative, among other things, to the gradualism that Darwin defended in The Origin of Species.

To conclude: the history of life is not the narrative that leads to a particular end, such as the final and triumphant emergence of Homo sapiens. Evolution has no definite purpose, there are no final causes, it is not teleological. Chance and necessity are the polar opposites that drive it forward, blindly. Evolution is the fact, Darwinism its theory.

Death of a hominin