ES 121/L – Evolutionary Biology

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Evolution
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Objectives

1. Understand the definition of evolution;

2. Differentiate the process and pattern of evolution;

3. Examine the evidences for evolution; and

4. Evaluate why Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural

selection is considered a unifying theory of biology.
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What is evolution?

 Evolution refers to change through time as species

become modified and diverge to produce multiple
descendant species.
 From the Latin word evolution – “an unrolling”
 The two main pillars of our knowledge of evolution
comes from:
1. Knowledge of the historical record of evolutionary change

2. Study of the process of evolutionary change

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Natural Selection

 Natural selection is the process in which individuals

with a particular trait tend to leave more offspring in
the next generation than do individuals with a
different trait.
 When selection is strong, evolution can proceed
considerably more rapidly than was envisioned by
Darwin.
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 What is the difference between evolution and natural

selection?
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In 2004, a fossil
“fishapod” was
discovered in the
Canadian Arctic.

Tiktaalik roseae is a 375-million-year-old fossil that looks like a

cross between an ancient fish and the first four-legged
animals, called tetrapods.
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Homework

1. How do the features of fossil organisms tell us something about

an organism’s behavior and the environment in which it lived?
2. How does Darwin’s theory of natural selection explain the
intermediate features of modern and fossil organisms, such as
Tiktaalik?
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Evolution: pattern versus process

 Natural selection is one process that can cause evolutionary

change, but natural selection can occur without producing
evolutionary change.
 Natural selection within populations refers to the situation in
which individuals with one variant of a trait tend to leave more
offspring that is healthy and fertile in the next generation than do
individuals with an alternative variant of the trait.
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History of Evolutionary Thought

 December 1831, Charles Darwin set sail on a

journey aboard the British naval vessel HMS
Beagle.
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History of Evolutionary Thought

 Plato (427-347 B.C.) said

that every species on Earth
has a perfect, or “essential,”
form and species variation is
imperfection of this essential
form.

 Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) saw

that organisms vary in
complexity and can be
arranged based on their
order of increasing
complexity.
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History of Evolutionary Thought

 Georges-Louis Leclerc (1707-88),

known as Count Buffon, was a
naturalist who worked most of his
life writing a 44-volume natural
history series that described all
known plants and animals.
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History of Evolutionary Thought

 Carolus Linnaeus
(1707-78) developed the
binomial system of
nomenclature and a
system of classification
for living organisms.
 He believed in the fixity
of species. He also
believed in the scala of
naturae – a sequential
ladder of life.
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History of Evolutionary Thought

 Biologist during the mid-eighteenth century used

comparative anatomy, the evaluation of similar
structures across a variety of species, to classify
organisms into groups.
 Explorers traveled the world and brought back newly
discovered extant and fossil organisms to be
compared to known living species.
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History of Evolutionary Thought

 Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was the first to suggest that

some species known only from the fossil record had become
extinct.
 He founded the science of paleontology (Greek palaios, “old”;
ontos, “having existed”), the study of fossils.
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History of Evolutionary Thought

 Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802),

Charles Darwin’s grandfather, was a
physician and a naturalist. His
writings on both botany and zoology
contained comments and footnotes
that suggested the possibility of
evolution.
 He based his conclusions on
changes in animals during
development, animal breeding by
humans, and the presence of
vestigial structures.
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History of Evolutionary Thought

 Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) was the first biologist to

offer a testable hypothesis that explained how evolution occurs
via adaptation to the environment.
 Lamarck proposed the idea of inheritance of acquired
characteristics.
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History of Evolutionary Thought
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History of Evolutionary Thought
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History of Evolutionary Thought

 Geologist James Hutton (1726-97) proposed a theory of slow,

uniform geological change.
 Charles Lyell (1797-1875), the foremost geologist of Darwin’s
time, made Hutton’s ideas popular in his book Principles of
Geology, published in 1830.
 Lyell went on to propose the theory of uniformitarianism, which
states that the natural process witnessed today are the same
processes that occurred in the past.
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History of Evolutionary Thought

 Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was an economist who studied

the factors that influence the growth and decline of human
populations. In 1798 Malthus published An Essay on the
Principle of Population, in which he proposed that the size of
human population is limited only by the quantity of resources,
such as food, water, and shelter, available to support it.
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Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
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Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
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Biogeographical Observations

 Biogeography ( Greek: bios, “life”; geo, “earth”; grapho, “writing”)

is the study of the geographical distribution of organisms
throughout the world.
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Natural Selection and Adaptation

 Darwin concluded early on that species change over time and

are not fixed entities crafted by a creator.
 By 1842, Darwin had fully developed his idea of natural
selection as a mechanism for evolutionary change.
 In 1858, Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) sent an essay to
Darwin in which he proposed a similar concept.
 The idea of natural selection was first presented to the Linnean
Society of London in 1858 as a pair of essays by Darwin and
Wallace.
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Natural Selection and Adaptation

 Natural selection is a process based on the following

observations:
1. Organisms exhibit variation that can be passed from one
generation to the next – that is, they have heritable variation.
2. Organisms compete for available resources.

3. Individuals within a population differ in terms of their

reproductive success.
4. Organisms become adapted to conditions as the
environment changes.
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Organisms Have Heritable Variations

 Darwin emphasized that the members of a population vary in

their functional, physical, and behavioral characteristics.
 Random mutations have been shown to be a source of new
genetic variation in a population.
 Genetic variation arises by chance and for no particular purpose,
and new variation is likely to be harmful as helpful or neutral to
the organism.
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Organisms Compete for Resources

 Darwin applied Malthus’ treatise on human population growth to

animal populations. He realized that if all offspring born to a
population were to survive, insufficient resources would be
available to support the growing population.
 Overproduction potential of a species I often referred to as the
geometric ratio of increase.
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Organisms Differ in Reproductive
Success

 Some individuals have favorable traits that enable them to better

compete for limited resources. The individual with favorable
traits acquire more resources than the individuals with less
favorable traits and can devote more energy to reproduction.
 Darwin called this ability to have more offspring differential
reproductive success.
 Fitness is the reproductive success of an individual relative to
other members of a population.
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Organisms Differ in Reproductive
Success

 Western Diamondback Rattlesnakes (Crotalus atrox)

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Organisms Become Adapted

 Adaptation is any evolved trait that helps an organism be more

suited to its environment. Adaptations are especially
recognizable when unrelated organisms living in a particular
environment display similar characteristics.
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Genes,
Populations, and
Evolution
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Learning outcomes

1. Explain how evolution in populations is related to a change in

allele frequencies.
2. List the five conditions necessary to maintain Hardy-Weinberg
equilibrium.
3. Apply the Hardy-Weinberg principle to estimate equilibrium
genotype frequencies.
4. Describe the agents of evolutionary change.
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 Population is defined as a group of organisms of a single

species living together in the same geographic area.
 Evolution is about genetic change – evolution is the change in
allele frequencies in a population over time.
 Microevolution pertains to evolutionary change within
populations.
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Microevolution in the Peppered Moth

 Population genetics is the field of biology that studies the

diversity of populations at the level of the gene.
 Population geneticists study microevolution by measuring the
diversity of a population in terms of allele and genotype
frequencies over generations.
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Allele Frequencies

 Gene pool – the alleles of all genes in all individuals in a

population.
 Allele frequency is the percentage of each allele in a
population’s gene pool.
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Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium

 A population in which allele frequencies do not change over time

is said to be in genetic equilibrium or Hardy-Weinberg
equilibrium (HWE) – a stable, nonevolving state.
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Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium

 Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium is derived from the work British

mathematician Godfrey H. Hardy and German physician
Wilhelm Weinberg, who in 1908 developed a mathematical
model to estimate genotype frequencies of a population that is in
genetic equilibrium.
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