Notes on the Mysterious Origin of Hippos

Africa, Anthracotheriidae, biology, brachiopods, bryozoans, cephalopods, Charles Darwin, constancy, corals, Doliochoeridae, Ernst Mayr, Evolution, evolutionary derivations, foraminifers, fossil record, genera, Georges Cuvier, ghost lineages, Hippopotamidae, Hippopotamus amphibius, hippos, Intelligent Design, Louis Agassiz, Martin Pickford, megafauna, National Geographic, ostracods, paleontology, species, stasis, subfamilies, trilobites, ” and waiting around without any function that might explain why natural selection working on random mutations bothered to engineer them
The family Hippopotamidae appears abruptly in the fossil record — like all the other groups that I have so far investigated in detail. Source
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Old Wine in New Bottles: How Darwin Recruited Malthus to Fortify a Failed Idea from Antiquity

abiogenesis, Alphonse de Candolle, Aristotle, atheists, atomism, Charles Bradlaugh, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, Christianity, complexification, David Hume, Edward Aveling, Epicurus, Erasmus Darwin, Evolution, Friedrich Engels, Georges Cuvier, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Greece, Homo sapiens, Intelligent Design, Karl Marx, Law of Correlation, Lucretius, Matthew Arnold, Middle Ages, natural selection, Origin of Species, Patrick Matthew, Plato, Poor Law, Rome, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Malthus, transhumanism, Unmoved Mover, Victorian England, William Paley
It was undoubtedly a tremendous philosophical coup for Darwin whose knowledge of formal philosophy was limited. Source
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