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Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution holds that all species are related and gradually change over generations. [1]
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
These genes have been highly conserved through hundreds of millions of years of evolution. [1] Evolutionary developmental biology (informally, evo-devo) is a field of biological research that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to infer how developmental processes evolved.
[3] The organism used is decided by the experimenter, based on the hypothesis to be tested. Many generations are required for adaptive mutation to occur, and experimental evolution via mutation is carried out in viruses or unicellular organisms with rapid generation times, such as bacteria and asexual clonal yeast.
Molecular evolution is the process of selective changes (mutations) at a molecular level (genes, proteins, etc.) throughout various branches in the tree of life (evolution). Molecular phylogenetics makes inferences of the evolutionary relationships that arise due to molecular evolution and results in the construction of a phylogenetic tree. [6]
R. A. Fisher (1890–1962), whose 1930 fundamental theorem of natural selection recognised the power of rigorous application of the theory of natural selection to population biology. [19] David Lack (1910–1973), a follower of Charles Darwin, worked to merge the fields of evolutionary biology and ecology, focusing mainly on birds and evolution.