The World Wide Panorama

Introduction

The World Wide Panorama event of the first quarter of 2024 is a collection of panoramas with the common theme of “Evolution”.

Theme Essay: Evolution

The essay conveys the team’s idea of the event. It is usually published together with the Theme announcement and offers a starting point for the contributing photographers.

Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations – says wikipedia.

In natural sciences the Theory of Evolution was first proposed by Charles Darwin in his book: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life “.

The Theory of Evolution is a scientific theory that - for quite some time – is well accepted in the scientific community. Evolutionary mechanisms can explain a wide variety of biological phenomena, from botany and zoology to microbiology, molecular biology and genetics.

The Theory of Evolution has been opposed by many Christian churches in the 19thcentury and early parts of the 20th century. Nowadays, the two largest Christian denominations – Protestant and Catholic – and parts of the Orthodox church no longer adhere to a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. There are still Christian groups, who oppose the Theory of Evolution, e.g. Fundamentalist/ Denominational Churches in the US and the Patriarchy of the Russian Orthodox church. In Islam, the Theory of Evolution is neither generally accepted nor generally rejected, whereas It is generally accepted in Judaism.

Mind you, dogmatic narrowness does occur with some exponents of evolutionary science. They insist that changes in the heritable characteristics can only and do only occur by chance. You can hold an entire seminar in epistemology on that fallacy.

Well, I could go on for hours on the different biological aspects of evolution – having you all drift into a deep and disturbed slumber.

But there is another, more general aspect on evolution. The term evolution is also used metaphorically for gradual changes over a long period of time – in society, in economy, in politics – as opposed to revolution.

Does that help you? Does that inspire some ideas for a panorama on that theme? I do you so -after all, you have voted for that theme

About the banner: The original pano is by Bernd Kronmueller, who took it in the Oxford Natural Museum as part of a tour.