Teorias da Evolução dos animais e do homem (darwinismo)
       Críticas à teoria da evolução de Charles Darwin e outras (neodarwinismo, equilíbrio pontuado, auto-organização, biologia evolucionária do desenvolvimento, evolução neutra, herança epigenética, engenharia genética natural)

 Para que a seleção natural produza muitas espécies novas, um grande grupo de diferentes espécies deve existir primeiro, o que não foi encontrado no registro fóssil

Second, for species selection to produce many new species, such as those that arose in the Cambrian explosion, a large pool of different species must first exist. The Precambrian fossil record does not, however, document the existence of such a large and diverse pool of competing Precambrian species upon which species selection (via allopatric speciation) could operate. Paleontologists Douglas Erwin and James Valentine exposed this problem in 1987 in a seminal paper entitled "Interpreting Great Developmental Experiments: The Fossil Record." They questioned the ability of both of the leading evolutionary theories of the time, punctuated equilibrium and neo-Darwinism, to explain the pattern of fossil appearance in the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record. Clearly, neo-Darwinism does not explain this pattern. But, as Valentine and Erwin argue, neither does punctuated equilibrium. As they conclude, the species selection mechanism requires a large set of species to act on.

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