Diener (Eds), Noba textbook series: Psychology. This chapter is a modified derivative of:īuss, D. Read more about the relationships between evolution and medicine in the Evolutionary Medicinechapter from Carl Zimmer’s book, The Tangled Bank. In these ways, an understanding of evolution can improve the quality of human life. To control hereditary diseases in people, researchers study the evolutionary histories of the disease-causing genes. To stay one step ahead of pathogenic diseases, researchers must understand the evolutionary patterns of disease-causing organisms. There are excellent examples of this in the field of medicine. Understanding evolution helps us solve biological problems that impact our lives. Go through additional case studies on evolution, including speciation in Connecting Concepts‘ Natural Selection interactive lesson and Speciation interactive lesson. Let’s learn about speciation in the birds of paradise in the following interactive video. Speciation is a lineage-splitting event that produces two or more separate species. It’s not so surprising that these blurry places exist-after all, the idea of a species is something that we humans invented for our own convenience! Speciation There are lots of other places where the boundary of a species is blurred. Should they be considered the same species or separate species? Carrion crow Hooded crow Hooded crows and carrion crows look different, and largely mate within their own groups, but in some areas they hybridize. The definition of a species as a group of interbreeding individuals cannot be easily applied to organisms that reproduce only or mainly asexually.Īlso, many plants and some animals form hybrids in nature. For example, many bacteria reproduce mainly asexually through binary fission. That definition of a species might seem cut and dried, but it is not-in nature, there are lots of places where it is difficult to apply this definition. In this sense, a species is the biggest gene pool possible under natural conditions. Species ConceptĪ species is often defined as a group of individuals that actually or potentially interbreed in nature. Before examining speciation, let’s first learn about what it means to be a species. Evolution means that we’re all distant cousins: humans and oak trees hummingbirds and whales.Īs explained toward the beginning of this chapter, “macroevolution” refers to the evolution of one or more species. Through the process of descent with modification, the common ancestor of life on Earth gave rise to the fantastic diversity that we see documented in the fossil record and around us today. The central idea of biological evolution is that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor, just as you and your cousins share a common grandmother. Lots of things change over time: trees lose their leaves and mountain ranges rise and erode, but they aren’t examples of biological evolution because they don’t involve descent through genetic inheritance.

Describe possible mechanisms of speciation.īiological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification.īiological evolution is not simply a matter of change over time.Distinguish between microevolution and macroevolution.Use data and physical traits to predict which evolutionary mechanisms and potential selective agents influence a population.Identify examples of intrasexual and intersexual selection.Recognize that new heritable traits result from random mutations.Describe different mechanisms of evolution, including natural selection, genetic drift, gene flow, and mutation.

Population genetics card game simulator