2.5 The Age of Earth By the time Darwin began writing On the Origin of Species,
ID: 151315 • Letter: 2
Question
2.5 The Age of Earth By the time Darwin began writing On the Origin of Species, data from geology had challenged a key tenet of the theory of special creation: that Earth has existed for less than 10,000 years. Much of this evidence was grounded in uniformi- tarianism. First articulated by James Hutton in the late 1700s, uniformitarian- ism is the claim that geological processes taking place now worked similarly in the past. It was a direct challenge to catastrophism, the hypothesis that today's geological formations resulted from catastrophic events in the past on a scale never observed now. Research inspired by uniformitarianism led Hutton, and later Charles Lyell, to infer that Earth was unimaginably old (Figure 2.31). These early geologists measured the rate of ongoing rock-forming processes such as the deposition of mud, sand, and gravel at beaches and river deltas and the accumula- tion of marine shells (the precursors of limestone). Based on these observations, it was clear that vast stretches of time were required to produce the immense rock formations being mapped in the British Isles and Europe For a more recently documented example, consider the age of Earth's Atlantic Ocean (Hazen 2010). The Atlantic was formed when the supercontinent PangaeaExplanation / Answer
Answer. Option B seems to be most promising.
Red point marks the node of the phylogenetic tree, it is the common ancestor. Means at this point, two organisms were maximum related to each other.
The red dots or nodes with the time scale shows that at this much time span they diverged from each other.
Dinosaurs will serve as an out group because evolution of it was separate from the others.
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