• Study Resource
  • Explore
    • Arts & Humanities
    • Business
    • Engineering & Technology
    • Foreign Language
    • History
    • Math
    • Science
    • Social Science

    Top subcategories

    • Advanced Math
    • Algebra
    • Basic Math
    • Calculus
    • Geometry
    • Linear Algebra
    • Pre-Algebra
    • Pre-Calculus
    • Statistics And Probability
    • Trigonometry
    • other →

    Top subcategories

    • Astronomy
    • Astrophysics
    • Biology
    • Chemistry
    • Earth Science
    • Environmental Science
    • Health Science
    • Physics
    • other →

    Top subcategories

    • Anthropology
    • Law
    • Political Science
    • Psychology
    • Sociology
    • other →

    Top subcategories

    • Accounting
    • Economics
    • Finance
    • Management
    • other →

    Top subcategories

    • Aerospace Engineering
    • Bioengineering
    • Chemical Engineering
    • Civil Engineering
    • Computer Science
    • Electrical Engineering
    • Industrial Engineering
    • Mechanical Engineering
    • Web Design
    • other →

    Top subcategories

    • Architecture
    • Communications
    • English
    • Gender Studies
    • Music
    • Performing Arts
    • Philosophy
    • Religious Studies
    • Writing
    • other →

    Top subcategories

    • Ancient History
    • European History
    • US History
    • World History
    • other →

    Top subcategories

    • Croatian
    • Czech
    • Finnish
    • Greek
    • Hindi
    • Japanese
    • Korean
    • Persian
    • Swedish
    • Turkish
    • other →
 
Profile Documents Logout
Upload
The Theory of Evolution: Of What Value to Psychology?
The Theory of Evolution: Of What Value to Psychology?

... Nor do these two assumptions bar genotype-environment interactions: The biasing of development in different directions when different genotypes develop in different environments. For example, Cooper and Zubek (1958) reared Tryon's (1940) "maze bright" and "maze dull" rats in enriched and impoverishe ...
Coyne et al 1997 Evolution 51:643
Coyne et al 1997 Evolution 51:643

... valleys clearly exist, there is little evidence for the assumption that movement between peaks involves a temporary loss of fitness; (3) although phases I and II of the theory may be at least theoretically plausible, there is little theoretical support for phase III of the shifting balance, in which ...
File
File

... adaptation to the environment and the origin of new species as closely related processes  From studies made years after Darwin’s voyage, biologists have concluded that this is what happened to the Galápagos finches ...
Genome evolution - The Faculty of Mathematics and Computer
Genome evolution - The Faculty of Mathematics and Computer

... Kimura’s analytic achievement was the solution of a certain class of Partial Differential Equations that describe the dynamic of allele frequencies under neutral evolution ...
Beginnings - McGraw Hill Higher Education
Beginnings - McGraw Hill Higher Education

... young born each generation because many of the young do not survive. Those that do survive pass on their genes to the next generation. Darwin believed that those who do survive to reproduce are probably superior in a number of ways to those who do not. In other words, the survivors are better adapte ...
on the origin of species
on the origin of species

... Just exactly what did Darwin do to bring about acceptance of the theory of evolution? This question brings us to the very heart of Darwin's contribution. Prior to Darwin, there was one central problem which kept evolution on the plane of a purely theoretical possibility, a mere hypothesis: what is t ...
p - Bonnabel Home Page
p - Bonnabel Home Page

... 15.12 Evolutionary novelties may arise in several y ways ƒ In the evolution of an eye or any other complex structure behavior, structure, behavior or biochemical pathway pathway, each step must bring a selective advantage to the organism possessing it and must increase the organism’s i ’ fitness fi ...
Stephen Jay Gould on species selection: 30 years of insight
Stephen Jay Gould on species selection: 30 years of insight

... we do in this paper, Table 1: 6, 9). By contrast, Lloyd and Gould (1993) and Gould (2002) treated A and B1 as species selection in the broad sense, and called it ‘‘emergent fitness species selection’’ (Table 1: 8). In spite of these differences, on the whole the definition of the effect hypothesis l ...
1 IntroBio
1 IntroBio

... Eight Properties of Living Things 1) Life is highly ordered and complex in structure. ...
Gene expression divergence and the origin of hybrid
Gene expression divergence and the origin of hybrid

... 1934; Muller 1940, 1942). If one species has an ancestral allele and its relative has a novel allele, then the novel allele must have initially arisen via mutation and appeared in the second species (or its ancestor) as a ...
the classification of living organisms
the classification of living organisms

... Living organisms can be grouped according to the things that they have in common. Classification is sorting living organisms into groups, based on their similarities. Living organisms are sorted and classified according to characteristics that they share. Early-day classification systems were based ...
Evolution Activities
Evolution Activities

... truly powerful is if it is run prior to the class activity and is repeated after it. It is interesting to observe whether students have changed their mind about issues after they have had a chance to learn more about them through the sharing of opinions in ...
EVOLUTION EXPERIMENTS WITH MICROORGANISMS: THE DYNAMICS AND GENETIC BASES OF ADAPTATION
EVOLUTION EXPERIMENTS WITH MICROORGANISMS: THE DYNAMICS AND GENETIC BASES OF ADAPTATION

... especially affected by this phenomenon, further delaying their spread. Finally, it is likely that there are more mutations that confer small advantages than those that provide large benefits21,22. Hence, the supply of small beneficial mutations will not be exhausted as readily as the supply of large ...
evolution
evolution

... Concept 6.3: Natural selection is the only evolutionary mechanism that consistently causes adaptive evolution. There are many examples of organisms that are well suited for life in their environments. Adaptations are features of organisms that improve their ability to survive and reproduce in thei ...
Evolution – The Extended Synthesis. A research proposal
Evolution – The Extended Synthesis. A research proposal

... after   it   was   shaped)   and   summarizes   major   This   feeling,   shared   by   numerous   scientists,   contributions  to  the  field  since  then.  It  discusses   should   not   at   all   be   surprising,   because   the   the   resulting   theoretical   implications   for   an   framewo ...
Human versus Amoeba - Valhalla High School
Human versus Amoeba - Valhalla High School

... organism can become sick. If the organism is not able to regulate its internal environment for an extended period of time, it will die. Amoeba are unable to regulate certain features of its internal environment, such as temperature, without changing its location. ...
Chapter 1: An introduction to Life on Earth
Chapter 1: An introduction to Life on Earth

... 1.1 What Is Life?  Organisms, collectively, have the capacity to evolve – Evolution is the process by which modern organisms descended, with modifications, from preexisting forms of life – Changes in DNA within populations occur over the course of generations, which results in evolution – Populati ...
FREE Sample Here
FREE Sample Here

... he struggled to understand what mechanisms could be at work to produce evolution. Malthus proposed that populations of animals and plants, including humans, A. increased arithmetically in numbers while the nutrients available only increased geometrically. B. decreased arithmetically in numbers while ...
404 Error - Page Not Found| University of Houston
404 Error - Page Not Found| University of Houston

... Finding out about water quality by collecting organisms Scientists studying water quality have developed and index system for classifying streams by counting the number and categories of macroinvertebrates present in the stream community. If lots of organisms that are intolerant of low oxygen levels ...
Different Evolutionary Paths to Complexity for Small and
Different Evolutionary Paths to Complexity for Small and

15 evolutionary gems
15 evolutionary gems

... they are mammals. They breathe air, and give birth to and suckle live young. Yet there is good evidence that mammals originally evolved on land. If that is so, then the ancestors of whales must have taken to the water at some point. As it happens, we have numerous fossils from the first ten million ...
22_Lectures_PPT
22_Lectures_PPT

... Lectures by Chris Romero Copyright © 2005 Pearson Education, Inc. publishing as Benjamin Cummings ...
•What was Lamarck right about? What was Lamarck wrong about
•What was Lamarck right about? What was Lamarck wrong about

... Tuesday, February 8, 2011 ...
Museum Visitors` Understanding of Evolution
Museum Visitors` Understanding of Evolution

... Researchers with the recently created Explore Evolution exhibition have taken a somewhat different approach. Using the evolutionary scenarios presented in the exhibit as a research tool, these researchers take a more detailed look at visitor understanding of evolution. They applied a conceptual mode ...
Text
Text

... this study grew several related theories: one, evolution did occur; two, evolutionary change was gradual, requiring thousands to millions of years; three, the primary mechanism for evolution was a process called natural selection; and four, the millions of species alive today arose from a single ori ...
< 1 ... 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 ... 449 >

Introduction to evolution



Evolution is the process of change in all forms of life over generations, and evolutionary biology is the study of how evolution occurs. Biological populations evolve through genetic changes that correspond to changes in the organisms' observable traits. Genetic changes include mutations, which are caused by damage or replication errors in an organism's DNA. As the genetic variation of a population drifts randomly over generations, natural selection gradually leads traits to become more or less common based on the relative reproductive success of organisms with those traits.The age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years old. The earliest undisputed evidence of life on Earth dates at least from 3.5 billion years ago, during the Eoarchean Era after a geological crust started to solidify following the earlier molten Hadean Eon. There are microbial mat fossils found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone discovered in Western Australia. Other early physical evidence of a biogenic substance is graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks discovered in western Greenland. More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and over 86 percent have not yet been described.Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life (covered instead by abiogenesis), but it does explain how the extremely simple early lifeforms evolved into the complex ecosystem that we see today. Based on the similarities between all present-day organisms, all life on Earth originated through common descent from a last universal ancestor from which all known species have diverged through the process of evolution. All individuals have hereditary material in the form of genes that are received from their parents, then passed on to any offspring. Among offspring there are variations of genes due to the introduction of new genes via random changes called mutations or via reshuffling of existing genes during sexual reproduction. The offspring differs from the parent in minor random ways. If those differences are helpful, the offspring is more likely to survive and reproduce. This means that more offspring in the next generation will have that helpful difference and individuals will not have equal chances of reproductive success. In this way, traits that result in organisms being better adapted to their living conditions become more common in descendant populations. These differences accumulate resulting in changes within the population. This process is responsible for the many diverse life forms in the world.The forces of evolution are most evident when populations become isolated, either through geographic distance or by other mechanisms that prevent genetic exchange. Over time, isolated populations can branch off into new species.The majority of genetic mutations neither assist, change the appearance of, nor bring harm to individuals. Through the process of genetic drift, these mutated genes are neutrally sorted among populations and survive across generations by chance alone. In contrast to genetic drift, natural selection is not a random process because it acts on traits that are necessary for survival and reproduction. Natural selection and random genetic drift are constant and dynamic parts of life and over time this has shaped the branching structure in the tree of life.The modern understanding of evolution began with the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. In addition, Gregor Mendel's work with plants helped to explain the hereditary patterns of genetics. Fossil discoveries in paleontology, advances in population genetics and a global network of scientific research have provided further details into the mechanisms of evolution. Scientists now have a good understanding of the origin of new species (speciation) and have observed the speciation process in the laboratory and in the wild. Evolution is the principal scientific theory that biologists use to understand life and is used in many disciplines, including medicine, psychology, conservation biology, anthropology, forensics, agriculture and other social-cultural applications.
  • studyres.com © 2025
  • DMCA
  • Privacy
  • Terms
  • Report