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In evolutionary biology, punctuated equilibrium (also called punctuated equilibria) is a theory that proposes that once a species appears in the fossil record, the population will become stable, showing little evolutionary change for most of its geological history. [1]
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
The finding that "Mitochondrial Eve" was relatively recent and African seemed to give the upper hand to the proponents of the Out of Africa hypothesis.But in 2002, Alan Templeton published a genetic analysis involving other loci in the genome as well, and this showed that some variants that are present in modern populations existed already in Asia hundreds of thousands of years ago. [31]
Life history theory draws on an evolutionary foundation, and studies the effects of natural selection on organisms, both throughout their lifetime and across generations. [8] It also uses measures of evolutionary fitness to determine if organisms are able to maximize or optimize this fitness, [ 9 ] by allocating resources to a range of ...
Unwittingly, humans have carried out evolution experiments for as long as they have been domesticating plants and animals. Selective breeding of plants and animals has led to varieties that differ dramatically from their original wild-type ancestors. Examples are the cabbage varieties, maize, or the large number of different dog breeds.
The mediaeval great chain of being as a staircase, implying the possibility of progress: [1] Ramon Lull's Ladder of Ascent and Descent of the Mind, 1305. Alternatives to Darwinian evolution have been proposed by scholars investigating biology to explain signs of evolution and the relatedness of different groups of living things.
A turning point of a differentiable function is a point at which the derivative has an isolated zero and changes sign at the point. [2] A turning point may be either a relative maximum or a relative minimum (also known as local minimum and maximum). A turning point is thus a stationary point, but not all stationary points are turning points.
The gene-centered view of evolution is a synthesis of the theory of evolution by natural selection, the particulate inheritance theory, and the rejection of transmission of acquired characters. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] It states that those alleles whose phenotypic effects successfully promote their own propagation will be favorably selected relative to ...