EVOLUTION

Saturday, 4 November 2023 9:30 pm

Notes taken by: Melanie Jane A. Magnawa

Screen clipping taken: 05/11/2023 9:53 pm

A Flurry of New Ideas

- 19th century naturalists tried to explain evidence that life
on Earth had changed over time.

•
– Assumed Earth to be in the thousands, not billions, of years
– Proposed theory of catastrophism
▪ Catastrophic geological events caused extinctions

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– Believed that a species gradually improved over generations due to a drive toward
perfection
– Proposed that environmental pressures cause an internal need for change
▪ Resulting change is inherited by offspring
– Thought about the processes that drive evolution
– Evolution
▪ Lamarck was the first to think about lineage, a line of descent
▪ Involves the idea that a species gradually improves over generations

•
– Principles of Geology supported theory of uniformity
▪ Over great spans of time, gradual, everyday geologic processes such as erosion
could have sculpted Earth
– Challenged idea that Earth was 6,000 years old
▪ Calculated that Earth is millions of years old
– Provided Darwin with insights

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– Naturalist abroad the Beagle
– Circumnavigated the globe over five years
– Made detailed observations of geology, fossils, plants, and animals
▪ Collected specimens like fossil glyptodonts
□ Noticed that Glyptodons and modern armadillos share traits, and
therefore, that they possibly share an ancestor
□ Helped Darwin develop a theory of evolution by natural selection

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– Economist that correlated increases in the size of human populations with episodes of
disease, famine and war
– Proposed idea that humans can run out of resources
▪ Human reproduction can exceed capacity of environment to sustain them
– Influenced Darwin's ideas of natural selection

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– Darwin applied Malthus' ideas broadly
▪ Realized some individuals have traits that make them better suited to their
environment than others
□ Those traits might enhance the individual's fitness or the ability to
survive and reproduce
□ Adaptations - a trait that imparts greater fitness to an individual
would become more common in a population over generations,
compared with less-competitive forms
Table 16.1 Evolution by Natural Selection

Natural populations have an inherent capacity to increase in size over time.

As a population expands, resources that are used by its members (such as food and living space)
eventually become limited
When resources are limited, members of a population complete for them

Individuals of a species share certain traits.

Individuals of a natural population vary in the details of those shared traits.
Shared traits have a heritable basis, in genes. Slightly different forms of those genes (alleles) give
rise to variation in shared traits.

A certain form of a shared trait may make its bearer better able to survive
Individuals of a population that better able to survive tend to leave more offspring
Thus, an allele associated with an adaptive trait tends to become more common in a population
over time.

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– Studied wildfire in the Amazon basin and Malay Archipelago
– Wrote to Darwin and Lyell about patterns in the geographic distribution of species
▪ Had come up with the same hypothesis as
Darwin: evolution occurs by natural selection
▪ Darwin and Wallace are both credited with presenting the hypothesis of
evolution in 1858, one year before On the Origin of Species was published.

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 • Most fossils are mineralized: • Trace fossils can be:
– Bones – Footprints and other impressions
– Teeth – Nests
– Shells – Burrows
– Seeds – Trails
– Spores – Eggshells
– Feces

• Fossilization
○ Begins when an organism or its traces become covered by sediments/volcanic ash
○ After a very long time, pressure and mineralization transform the remains into rock
○ Fossils are found in stacked layers, on top of older fossils in older layers

• Radiometric dating
○ The time it takes for half of the atoms in a sample of radioisotope to decay is called
half-life
○ Can determine the age of rocks and fossils

• Fossil records holds clues to evolution:

○ Ancestors of whales probably walked on land
○ The skull and lower jaw have characteristics similar to those of ancient carnivorous
land animals
○ With their artiodactyl-like ankle bones, Rodhocetus and Dorudon were probably
offshoots of the artiodactyl-to-modern-whale lineage

• Carbon Dating
○ Recent fossils that still contain carbon can be dated (carbon 14)
▪ The half-life of 14C is 5,370 years
▪ Most 14C in a fossil will have decayed after about 60,000 years
▪ 14C in CO2 enters food chains through photosynthesis
▪ Ratio of 14C to 12C is used to calculate how many half-lives passed since the
organism died.

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• Theory of Plates Tectonics
○ Continents were one big supercontinent called Pangea
▪ Formed about 237 mya (Triassic); broke up about 152 mya ago (Jurassic)
○ Continents drift over time
▪ Continental plates move on more than 10 cm/year
▪ New crust spreads outward from oceanic ridges, forcing tectonic plates
away from the ridge and into trenches
• Gondwana
○ Supercontinent that existed before Pangea, more than 500 mya
▪ Identical layers of rock around the Southern Hemisphere hold matching
fossils of organisms that were extinct millions of years before Pangea
formed.
○ Included most land masses that are now in the Southern Hemisphere, India and
Arabia

• Geologic time scale

○ Chronology of Earth's history
○ Each layer offers clues about conditions on Earth at the time layer was
deposited
○ Fossils in each layer are a record of life during that period of time
○ Correlates geologic and evolutionary events

• Clues about the history of a lineage may be found in:

○ Fossils
○ Body form of modern organisms
○ Body function of modern organisms
• Morphological divergence
○ Change from the body form of a common ancestor
• Homologous structures
○ Body parts that appear different in different lineages, but are similar in some aspect
▪ Become modified to a different size, shape, or function in different lineages
○ Are evidence of a common ancestor
• Morphological convergence
○ Independent evolution of similar body parts in different lineages
• Analogous structures
○ Body parts that look alike in different lineages but did not evolve in a common ancestor

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• There are generally fewer differences between the DNA of more closely related lineages
• Similar genes give rise to similar proteins
• Fewer differences occur among the proteins of more closely related lineages
• Similar patterns of embryonic development reflect shared ancestry
○ Master genes that control embryonic development patterns have changes very little
or not all over evolutionary time
○ Master genes with similar sequence and function in different lineages are strong
evidence that those lineages are related

Comparing Vertebrate Embryos

• Master genes
• Guide formation of specific body parts during development
• Example: How genes
• Similar genes give rise to similar proteins
• Proteins are also commonly compared
○ The amino acid sequence of a protein is compared between several species

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