EVOLUTION

Group Members:
 Muneer Ahmad (2021-UOBS-449)
 Noreen Fatima (2021-UOBS-066)
 Razia Ishaque (2021-UOBS-)
 Qamar Ibrahim (2021-UOBS-)
 M. Hasnain (2021-UOBS-063)
Department: Biological Science
Program: BS Zoology
Semester: 3rd
Session: 2021-2025
Course: Cell Biology, Genetics, and Evolution
Instructor: Mam Afifa Kamal
 EVOLUTION

Evolution, theory in postulates that the various types of plants, animals, and other living
things on Earth have their origin in other preexisting types. The distinguishable differences are
due to modifications in successive generations. The theory of evolution is one of the fundamental
keystones of modern biological theory.
The diversity of the living world is staggering. More than 2 million existing species of organisms
have been named and described; many more remain to be discovered—from 10 million to 30
million, according to some estimates. What is impressive is not just the numbers but also the
incredible heterogeneity in size, shape, and way of life—from lowly bacteria, measuring less
than a thousandth of a millimeter in diameter, to stately sequoias, rising 100 meters above the
ground and weighing several thousand tons; from bacteria living in hot springs at temperatures
near the boiling point of water to fungi and algae thriving on the ice masses of Antarctica and in
saline pools at −23 °C; and from the giant tube, worms discovered living near hydrothermal
vents on the dark ocean floor to spiders and plants existing on the slopes of Mount Everest more
than 6,000 meters above sea level.
The virtually infinite variations in life are the fruit of the evolutionary process. All living
creatures are related by descent from common ancestors. Humans and other mammals descend
from shrew-like creatures that lived more than 150 million years ago; mammals, birds, reptiles,
amphibians, and fishes share as ancestors aquatic worms that lived 600 million years ago; and all
plants and animals derive from bacteria-like microorganisms that originated more than 3 billion
years ago. Biological evolution is a process of descent with modification. Lineages of organisms
change through generations; diversity arises because the lineages that descend from common
ancestors diverge through time.
The 19th-century English naturalist Charles Darwin argued that organisms come about by
evolution, and he provided a scientific explanation, essentially correct but incomplete, of how
evolution occurs and why it is that organisms have features—such as wings, eyes, and kidneys—
clearly structured to serve specific functions. Natural selection was the fundamental concept in

GENERAL OVERVIEW
his explanation. Natural selection occurs because individuals having more-useful traits, such as
more-acute vision or swifter legs, survive better and produce more progeny than individuals with
less-favorable traits. Genetics, a science born in the 20th century, reveals in detail how natural
selection works and led to the development of the modern theory of evolution. Beginning in the
1960s, a related scientific discipline, molecular biology, enormously advanced knowledge of
biological evolution and made it possible to investigate detailed problems that had seemed
completely out of reach only a short time previously—for example, how similar the genes of
humans and chimpanzees might be (they differ in about 1–2 percent of the units that make up the
genes).

 The evidence for evolution:

Darwin and other 19th-century biologists found compelling evidence for biological
evolution in the comparative study of living organisms, their geographic distribution, and
the fossil remains of extinct organisms. Since Darwin’s time, the evidence from these sources
has become considerably stronger and more comprehensive, while biological disciplines that
emerged more recently—genetics, biochemistry, physiology, ecology, behavior (ethology), and
especially molecular biology—have supplied powerful additional evidence and detailed
confirmation. The amount of information about evolutionary history stored in the DNA and
proteins of living things is virtually unlimited; scientists can reconstruct any detail of the
evolutionary history of life by investing sufficient time and laboratory resources.

1. Fossil Record

Paleontologists have recovered and studied the fossil remains of many thousands of organisms
that lived in the past. This fossil record shows that many kinds of extinct organisms were very
different in form from any now living.

When an organism dies, it is usually destroyed by other forms of life and by weathering
processes. On rare occasions, somebody’s parts—particularly hard ones such as shells, teeth, or
bones—are preserved by being buried in mud or protected in some other way from predators and
weather. Eventually, they may become petrified and preserved indefinitely with the rocks in
which they are embedded. Methods such as radiometric dating—measuring the amounts of
natural radioactive atoms that remain in certain minerals to determine the elapsed time since they
were constituted—make it possible to estimate the period when the rocks, and the fossils
associated with them, were formed.
2. Structural Similarities

The skeletons of turtles, horses, humans, birds, and bats

are strikingly similar, despite the different ways of life of
these animals and the diversity of their environments. The
correspondence, bone by bone, can easily be seen not only
in the limbs but also in every other part of the body. From
a purely practical point of view, it is incomprehensible that
a turtle should swim, a horse run, a person writes, and
a bird or a bat fly with forelimb structures built of the
same bones. An engineer could design better limbs in each
case. But if it is accepted that all of these
skeletons inherited their structures from a common
ancestor and became modified only as they adapted to
different ways of life, the similarity of their structures
makes sense.

Comparative anatomy investigates the homologies, or

inherited similarities, among organisms in bone structure
and other parts of the body. The correspondence of
structures is typically very close among some organisms—
the different varieties of songbirds, for instance—but
becomes less so as the organisms being compared are less
closely related in their evolutionary history. The
similarities are fewer between mammals and birds than
they are between mammals, and they are still fewer
between mammals and fishes. Similarities in structure,
therefore, not only manifest evolution but also help to reconstruct the phylogeny, or evolutionary
history, of organisms.

3. Biogeography

Darwin also saw a confirmation of evolution in the geographic distribution of plants and animals,
and later knowledge has reinforced his observations. For example, there are about 1,500
known species of Drosophila vinegar flies in the world; nearly one-third of them live in Hawaii
and nowhere else, although the total area of the archipelago is less than one-twentieth the area of
California or Germany. Also, in Hawaii are more than 1,000 species of snails and other land
mollusks that exist nowhere else. This unusual diversity is easily explained by evolution. The
islands of Hawaii are extremely isolated and have had few colonizers—i.e, animals and plants
that arrived there from elsewhere and established populations. Those species that did colonize
the islands found many unoccupied ecological niches, local environments suited to sustaining
them, and lacking predators that would prevent them from multiplying. In response, these species
rapidly diversified; this process of diversifying to fill ecological niches is called adaptive
radiation. Each of the world’s continents has its distinctive collection of animals and plants. In
Africa are rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, lions, hyenas, giraffes, zebras, lemurs, monkeys with
narrow noses and no prehensile tails, chimpanzees, and gorillas. South America, which extends
over much the same latitudes as Africa, has none of these animals; it instead has pumas, jaguars,
tapir, llamas, raccoons, opossums, armadillos, and monkeys with broad noses and large
prehensile tails.

 History of evolutionary theory:

1. Early Ideas

All human cultures have developed their explanations for the origin of the world and human
beings and other creatures. Traditional Judaism and Christianity explain the origin of living
beings and their adaptations to their environments—wings, gills, hands, flowers—as the
handiwork of an omniscient God. The philosophers of ancient Greece had their
creation myths. Anaximander proposed that animals could be transformed from one kind into
another, and Empedocles speculated that they were made up of various combinations of
preexisting parts. Closer to modern evolutionary ideas were the proposals of early Church
Fathers such as Gregory of Nazianzus and Augustine, both of whom maintained that not all
species of plants and animals were created by God; rather, some had developed in historical
times from God’s creations. Their motivation was not biological but religious—it would have
been impossible to hold representatives of all species in a single vessel such as Noah’s Ark;
hence, some species must have come into existence only after the Flood.

The English physician Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, offered in

his Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794–96) some evolutionary speculations, but they
were not further developed and had no real influence on subsequent theories. The Swedish
botanist Carolus Linnaeus devised the hierarchical system of plant and animal classification that
is still in use in a modernized form. Although he insisted on the fixity of species,
his classification system eventually contributed much to the acceptance of the concept of
common descent.

2. Charles Darwin

The founder of the modern theory of evolution was Charles Darwin. Darwin accepted the facts
of adaptation—hands are for grasping, eyes for seeing, lungs for breathing. But he showed that
the multiplicity of plants and animals, with their exquisite and varied adaptations, could be
explained by a process of natural selection, without recourse to a Creator or any designer agent.
This achievement would prove to have intellectual and cultural implications more profound and
lasting than his multipronged evidence that convinced contemporaries of the fact of evolution.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is summarized in the Origin of Species as follows:

As many more individuals are produced than can survive, there must in every case be a struggle for
existence, either one individual with another of the same species, with the individuals of distinct species,
or with the physical conditions of life.… Can it, then, be thought improbable, seeing that variations useful
to man have undoubtedly occurred, that other variations useful in some way to each being in the great
and complex battle of life, should sometimes occur in the course of thousands of generations? If such do
occur, can we doubt (remembering that many more individuals are born than can survive) that individuals
having any advantage, however slight, over others, would have the best chance of surviving and
of procreating their kind? On the other hand, we may feel sure that any variation in the least degree
injurious would be rigidly destroyed. This preservation of favorable variations and the rejection of
injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.
Natural selection was proposed by Darwin primarily to account for the adaptive organization of
living beings; it is a process that promotes or maintains adaptation. Evolutionary change through
time and evolutionary diversification (multiplication of species) are not directly promoted by
natural selection, but they often ensue as by-products of natural selection as it fosters adaptation
to different environments.

3. Modern Concepts

The publication of the Origin of Species produced considerable public excitement. Scientists,
politicians, clergymen, and notables of all kinds read and discussed the book, defending or
deriding Darwin’s ideas. On July 1, 1858, one year before the publication of the Origin, a paper
jointly authored by Wallace and Darwin was presented, in the absence of both, to the Linnean
Society in London—with apparently little notice. Greater credit is duly given to Darwin than to
Wallace for the idea of evolution by natural selection; Darwin developed the theory in
considerably more detail, provided far more evidence for it, and was primarily responsible for its
acceptance.

A younger English contemporary of Darwin, with considerable influence during the latter part of
the 19th and in the early 20th century, was Herbert Spencer. A philosopher rather than a
biologist, he became an energetic proponent of evolutionary ideas, popularized several slogans,
such as “survival of the fittest” (which was taken up by Darwin in later editions of the Origin),
and engaged in social and metaphysical speculations. His ideas considerably damaged proper
understanding and acceptance of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin wrote of
Spencer’s speculations:

His deductive manner of treating any subject is wholly opposed to my frame of mind.… His
fundamental generalizations (which have been compared in importance by some persons with
Newton’s laws!) which I dare say may be very valuable from a philosophical point of view, are of
such a nature that they do not seem to me to be of any strictly scientific use.