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Involution is the shrinking or return of an organ to a former size. At a cellular level, involution is characterized by the process of proteolysis of the basement membrane (basal lamina), leading to epithelial regression and apoptosis, with accompanying stromal fibrosis. The consequent reduction in cell number and reorganization of stromal ...
The pygmy mammoth is an example of insular dwarfism, a case of Foster's rule, its unusually small body size an adaptation to the limited resources of its island home.. A biological rule or biological law is a generalized law, principle, or rule of thumb formulated to describe patterns observed in living organisms.
The extinction event may have been more severe for the larger-bodied species, leaving only species of smaller-bodied animals behind. [1] As such, organisms in the smaller species which then make up the recovering ecosystem, will take time to evolve larger bodies to replace the extinct species and re-occupy the vacant ecological niche for a large-bodied animal. [1]
In developmental biology, pattern formation refers to the generation of complex organizations of cell fates in space and time. The role of genes in pattern formation is an aspect of morphogenesis , the creation of diverse anatomies from similar genes, now being explored in the science of evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo.
For example, the separation of fingers and toes in a developing human embryo occurs because cells between the digits undergo apoptosis. Unlike necrosis, apoptosis produces cell fragments called apoptotic bodies that phagocytes are able to engulf and remove before the contents of the cell can spill out onto surrounding cells and cause damage to ...
Atrophy is the partial or complete wasting away of a part of the body. Causes of atrophy include mutations (which can destroy the gene to build up the organ), poor nourishment, poor circulation, loss of hormonal support, loss of nerve supply to the target organ, excessive amount of apoptosis of cells, and disuse or lack of exercise or disease intrinsic to the tissue itself.
Strong robustness up to a limit, with little robustness beyond, is a pattern that could increase evolvability in a fluctuating environment. [17] Canalisation of a large set of genotypes into a limited phenotypic space has been suggested as a mechanism for the accumulation, in a neutral manner, of mutations that could otherwise be deleterious. [18]
Phenotypic plasticity refers to some of the changes in an organism's behavior, morphology and physiology in response to a unique environment. [1] [2] Fundamental to the way in which organisms cope with environmental variation, phenotypic plasticity encompasses all types of environmentally induced changes (e.g. morphological, physiological, behavioural, phenological) that may or may not be ...