The Evolution Gene (The Evolution Gene Series Book 1)

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Available for immediate download. The Biology of Belief 10th Anniversary Edition: The amazing story of how life begins and how it ends Dec 4, Available to ship in days. Read this and over 1 million books with Kindle Unlimited. Previous Page 1 2 Lipton David Reich Robert Plomin. Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. Johns Hopkins Press Health Book. Free Shipping by Amazon. Include Out of Stock. Weather forecasters, having to cope with explaining appallingly complex problems, make statements like: The language encourages thought about endpoints rather than with all the details of how they are achieved.

Richard Dawkins author of The Selfish Gene. Photo by Marty Stone , Wikimedia, https: It may be helpful to forget biology for a moment and think about the spread of a new brand of biscuit in supermarkets. Consider the spread from the perspective of the recipe. While shoppers select biscuits and eat them, it is the recipe for making desirable biscuits that survives and spreads in the long run. A phrase in the recipe might specify the amount of sugar to be added and makes the difference between a popular and a less popular biscuit.

In that sense it is selfish. This novel way of looking at things is unlikely to mislead anyone into believing that what shoppers really do in supermarkets, when they pick a particular brand of biscuit off the shelves, is select a word in the recipe used for making the biscuits.

They select the brand of biscuit they like.

The agents of differential survival and differential reproductive success will usually be characteristics of whole individuals including the structures they make, but they might be characteristics of molecules or of symbiotic groups, or the evolvability of taxonomic lineages. The mechanistic language does not translate into the teleological language. For population geneticists, a genetic difference is identified by means of a biochemical, physiological, structural or behavioural difference between organisms after other potential sources of difference have been excluded by appropriate procedures.

In the technically precise language of population geneticists, a genetic allele must be compared with another from which it differs in its consequences. In selfish-gene language, it stands alone as an entity, absolute in its own right. The perception generated by one meaning of gene does not relate to the same evidence as that generated by the other.

They may arise because other conditions that are necessary for the peculiarities of their behaviour are shared. Common odours and preferences for familiar smells might arise from the particular combination of bacteria that breakdown the fats secreted onto the body surface. When the bacteria pass from mother to offspring, so does the source of her special smell.

This is not to downplay the roles of genes. But it emphasises that the nothing-but approach to genes is clearly wrong. Taking a systems approach to the role of genes generates much more fruitful understanding than treating them as providing single causes for development and evolution.

Denis Noble argues that living organisms operate at multiple levels of complexity and must therefore be analysed from a multi-scale, relativistic perspective. Noble explains that all biological processes operate by means of molecular, cellular and organismal networks.

The interactive nature of these fundamental processes is at the core of biological relativity and, as such, challenges simplified molecular reductionism. Noble shows that such an integrative view emerges as the necessary consequence of the rigorous application of mathematics to biology.

Drawing on his pioneering work in the mathematical physics of biology, he shows that what emerges is a deeply humane picture of the role of the organism in constraining its chemistry, including its genes, to serve the organism as a whole, especially in the interaction with its social environment. This humanistic, holistic approach challenges the common gene-centred view held by many in modern biology.

Ecological Development, Niche Construction, and Adaptation. Oxford University Press, https: An accessible and clear-headed introduction to genetics is given in Griffiths, P.

Introduction to evolution

Duke University Press, https: As the title of her book suggests, all factors impinging on the developing organism provide information of a kind. More recently, epigenetics has become mechanistically defined as the molecular processes by which traits defined by a given profile of gene expression can persist across mitotic cell divisions, but which do not involve changes in the nucleotide sequence of the DNA see Carey, N.

The general principles apply at higher levels of organisation and are involved in mediating many aspects of developmental plasticity seen in intact organisms. The processes involved in gene expression and suppression can be transmitted from one generation to the next See Gissis, S. From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology. Further support for the revision of the orthodoxies of evolutionary theory has come from microbiology Shapiro, J.

A View from the 21st Century. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Shapiro argues that cells must be viewed as complex systems that control their own growth, reproduction and shape their own evolution over time. You can suggest to your library or institution to subscribe to the program OpenEdition Freemium for books. Feel free to give our address: We will be glad to provide it with information about OpenEdition and its subscription offers.

Introduction to evolution - Wikipedia

We will forward your request to your library as soon as possible. OpenEdition is a web platform for electronic publishing and academic communication in the humanities and social sciences. Desktop version Mobile version. Results per book Results per chapter. Avoiding Inbreeding and Incest 1. Active Role of Behaviour. Search inside the book. Genes in Development and Evolution p. Ecological Development, Niche Construction, and Ad Zoom in Original jpeg, 20k. Zoom in Original jpeg, 22k. Notes 1 This debate is well-described in Noble, D.

List of illustrations Caption The process of making a cake. Freemium Recommend to your library for acquisition. Behaviour, Development and Evolution Patrick Bateson. The postal address of the institution is: Finally, mating must be totally random, with all males or females in some cases being equally desirable mates. This ensures a true random mixing of alleles. A population that is in Hardy—Weinberg equilibrium is analogous to a deck of cards ; no matter how many times the deck is shuffled, no new cards are added and no old ones are taken away. A population bottleneck occurs when the population of a species is reduced drastically over a short period of time due to external forces.

A bottleneck can reduce or eliminate genetic variation from a population.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

Further drift events after the bottleneck event can also reduce the population's genetic diversity. The lack of diversity created can make the population at risk to other selective pressures. A common example of a population bottleneck is the Northern elephant seal.

Due to excessive hunting throughout the 19th century, the population of the northern elephant seal was reduced to 30 individuals or less. They have made a full recovery, with the total number of individuals at around , and growing. The effects of the bottleneck are visible, however. The seals are more likely to have serious problems with disease or genetic disorders, because there is almost no diversity in the population.

The founder effect occurs when a small group from one population splits off and forms a new population, often through geographic isolation. This new population's allelic frequency is probably different from the original population's, and will change how common certain alleles are in the populations. The founders of the population will determine the genetic makeup, and potentially the survival, of the new population for generations. One example of the founder effect is found in the Amish migration to Pennsylvania in Two of the founders of the colony in Pennsylvania carried the recessive allele for Ellis—van Creveld syndrome.

Because the Amish tend to be religious isolates, they interbreed, and through generations of this practice the frequency of Ellis—van Creveld syndrome in the Amish people is much higher than the frequency in the general population. The modern evolutionary synthesis is based on the concept that populations of organisms have significant genetic variation caused by mutation and by the recombination of genes during sexual reproduction. It defines evolution as the change in allelic frequencies within a population caused by genetic drift, gene flow between sub populations, and natural selection.

Natural selection is emphasised as the most important mechanism of evolution; large changes are the result of the gradual accumulation of small changes over long periods of time.

The modern evolutionary synthesis is the outcome of a merger of several different scientific fields to produce a more cohesive understanding of evolutionary theory. In the s, Ronald Fisher , J. Haldane and Sewall Wright combined Darwin's theory of natural selection with statistical models of Mendelian genetics , founding the discipline of population genetics. In the s and s, efforts were made to merge population genetics, the observations of field naturalists on the distribution of species and sub species, and analysis of the fossil record into a unified explanatory model.

Dobzhansky's work Genetics and the Origin of Species helped bridge the gap between genetics and field biology by presenting the mathematical work of the population geneticists in a form more useful to field biologists, and by showing that wild populations had much more genetic variability with geographically isolated subspecies and reservoirs of genetic diversity in recessive genes than the models of the early population geneticists had allowed for.

Mayr, on the basis of an understanding of genes and direct observations of evolutionary processes from field research, introduced the biological species concept, which defined a species as a group of interbreeding or potentially interbreeding populations that are reproductively isolated from all other populations. Both Dobzhansky and Mayr emphasised the importance of subspecies reproductively isolated by geographical barriers in the emergence of new species. The paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson helped to incorporate paleontology with a statistical analysis of the fossil record that showed a pattern consistent with the branching and non-directional pathway of evolution of organisms predicted by the modern synthesis.

Behaviour, Development and Evolution

Scientific evidence for evolution comes from many aspects of biology and includes fossils , homologous structures, and molecular similarities between species' DNA. Research in the field of paleontology , the study of fossils, supports the idea that all living organisms are related.

Fossils provide evidence that accumulated changes in organisms over long periods of time have led to the diverse forms of life we see today. A fossil itself reveals the organism's structure and the relationships between present and extinct species, allowing paleontologists to construct a family tree for all of the life forms on Earth. Modern paleontology began with the work of Georges Cuvier.

Cuvier noted that, in sedimentary rock , each layer contained a specific group of fossils. The deeper layers, which he proposed to be older, contained simpler life forms. He noted that many forms of life from the past are no longer present today. As a result, the general idea of catastrophism has re-emerged as a valid hypothesis for at least some of the rapid changes in life forms that appear in the fossil records.

A very large number of fossils have now been discovered and identified. These fossils serve as a chronological record of evolution. The fossil record provides examples of transitional species that demonstrate ancestral links between past and present life forms. The implication from such a find is that modern reptiles and birds arose from a common ancestor. The comparison of similarities between organisms of their form or appearance of parts, called their morphology , has long been a way to classify life into closely related groups.

This can be done by comparing the structure of adult organisms in different species or by comparing the patterns of how cells grow, divide and even migrate during an organism's development. Taxonomy is the branch of biology that names and classifies all living things. Scientists use morphological and genetic similarities to assist them in categorising life forms based on ancestral relationships.

For example, orangutans , gorillas , chimpanzees , and humans all belong to the same taxonomic grouping referred to as a family—in this case the family called Hominidae. These animals are grouped together because of similarities in morphology that come from common ancestry called homology. Strong evidence for evolution comes from the analysis of homologous structures: The forelimbs of a human, cat , whale , and bat all have strikingly similar bone structures.

However, each of these four species' forelimbs performs a different task. The same bones that construct a bat's wings, which are used for flight, also construct a whale's flippers, which are used for swimming. Such a "design" makes little sense if they are unrelated and uniquely constructed for their particular tasks. The theory of evolution explains these homologous structures: These changes in structure have produced forelimbs adapted for different tasks. However, anatomical comparisons can be misleading, as not all anatomical similarities indicate a close relationship. Organisms that share similar environments will often develop similar physical features, a process known as convergent evolution.

Both sharks and dolphins have similar body forms, yet are only distantly related—sharks are fish and dolphins are mammals. Such similarities are a result of both populations being exposed to the same selective pressures. Within both groups, changes that aid swimming have been favored. Thus, over time, they developed similar appearances morphology , even though they are not closely related. In some cases, anatomical comparison of structures in the embryos of two or more species provides evidence for a shared ancestor that may not be obvious in the adult forms. As the embryo develops, these homologies can be lost to view, and the structures can take on different functions.

Part of the basis of classifying the vertebrate group which includes humans , is the presence of a tail extending beyond the anus and pharyngeal slits. Both structures appear during some stage of embryonic development but are not always obvious in the adult form. Because of the morphological similarities present in embryos of different species during development, it was once assumed that organisms re-enact their evolutionary history as an embryo.

It was thought that human embryos passed through an amphibian then a reptilian stage before completing their development as mammals. Such a reenactment, often called recapitulation theory , is not supported by scientific evidence. What does occur, however, is that the first stages of development are similar in broad groups of organisms.

As development continues, specific features emerge from this basic pattern. Homology includes a unique group of shared structures referred to as vestigial structures. Vestigial refers to anatomical parts that are of minimal, if any, value to the organism that possesses them. These apparently illogical structures are remnants of organs that played an important role in ancestral forms.

Such is the case in whales, which have small vestigial bones that appear to be remnants of the leg bones of their ancestors which walked on land. Biogeography is the study of the geographical distribution of species. Evidence from biogeography, especially from the biogeography of oceanic islands , played a key role in convincing both Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace that species evolved with a branching pattern of common descent.

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Furthermore, islands often contain clusters of closely related species that have very different ecological niches , that is have different ways of making a living in the environment. Such clusters form through a process of adaptive radiation where a single ancestral species colonises an island that has a variety of open ecological niches and then diversifies by evolving into different species adapted to fill those empty niches.

Every living organism with the possible exception of RNA viruses contains molecules of DNA, which carries genetic information.

Genes are the pieces of DNA that carry this information, and they influence the properties of an organism. Genes determine an individual's general appearance and to some extent their behavior. If two organisms are closely related, their DNA will be very similar. For example, brothers are closely related and have very similar DNA, while cousins share a more distant relationship and have far more differences in their DNA. Similarities in DNA are used to determine the relationships between species in much the same manner as they are used to show relationships between individuals.

Comparisons of DNA indicate that humans and chimpanzees are more closely related to each other than either species is to gorillas. The field of molecular systematics focuses on measuring the similarities in these molecules and using this information to work out how different types of organisms are related through evolution. These comparisons have allowed biologists to build a relationship tree of the evolution of life on Earth.

Artificial selection is the controlled breeding of domestic plants and animals. Humans determine which animal or plant will reproduce and which of the offspring will survive; thus, they determine which genes will be passed on to future generations. The process of artificial selection has had a significant impact on the evolution of domestic animals. For example, people have produced different types of dogs by controlled breeding.

The differences in size between the Chihuahua and the Great Dane are the result of artificial selection. Artificial selection has produced a wide variety of plants. In artificial selection the new breed or variety that emerges is the one with random mutations attractive to humans, while in natural selection the surviving species is the one with random mutations useful to it in its non-human environment. In both natural and artificial selection the variations are a result of random mutations, and the underlying genetic processes are essentially the same.

Darwin proposed that if humans could achieve dramatic changes in domestic animals in short periods, then natural selection, given millions of years, could produce the differences seen in living things today. Coevolution is a process in which two or more species influence the evolution of each other. All organisms are influenced by life around them; however, in coevolution there is evidence that genetically determined traits in each species directly resulted from the interaction between the two organisms.

An extensively documented case of coevolution is the relationship between Pseudomyrmex , a type of ant , and the acacia , a plant that the ant uses for food and shelter. The relationship between the two is so intimate that it has led to the evolution of special structures and behaviors in both organisms. The ant defends the acacia against herbivores and clears the forest floor of the seeds from competing plants. In response, the plant has evolved swollen thorns that the ants use as shelter and special flower parts that the ants eat.

Rather, across a population small genetic changes in both ant and tree benefited each. The benefit gave a slightly higher chance of the characteristic being passed on to the next generation. Over time, successive mutations created the relationship we observe today. Given the right circumstances, and enough time, evolution leads to the emergence of new species. Scientists have struggled to find a precise and all-inclusive definition of species.

BACKGROUND AND HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Ernst Mayr defined a species as a population or group of populations whose members have the potential to interbreed naturally with one another to produce viable, fertile offspring. The members of a species cannot produce viable, fertile offspring with members of other species. Speciation is the lineage-splitting event that results in two separate species forming from a single common ancestral population. Allopatric speciation begins when a population becomes geographically separated. For speciation to occur, separation must be substantial, so that genetic exchange between the two populations is completely disrupted.

In their separate environments, the genetically isolated groups follow their own unique evolutionary pathways. Each group will accumulate different mutations as well as be subjected to different selective pressures. The accumulated genetic changes may result in separated populations that can no longer interbreed if they are reunited. If interbreeding is no longer possible, then they will be considered different species. Usually the process of speciation is slow, occurring over very long time spans; thus direct observations within human life-spans are rare.

However speciation has been observed in present-day organisms, and past speciation events are recorded in fossils. These fish have complex mating rituals and a variety of colorations; the slight modifications introduced in the new species have changed the mate selection process and the five forms that arose could not be convinced to interbreed. The theory of evolution is widely accepted among the scientific community, serving to link the diverse specialty areas of biology.

The significance of evolutionary theory is summarised by Theodosius Dobzhansky as " nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. There is much discussion within the scientific community concerning the mechanisms behind the evolutionary process.

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