Expansion and the Evolutionary Lottery :: Evolution Essays

Expansion and the Evolutionary LotteryFor a young scholar larn the basic concepts of science and biology, evolution was this grand theory of past life becoming more like present life over time via the usance of such complicated and foreboding means as natural selection and survival of the fittest. I came to understand that there was endless diversity of life, and variation was a result of the interactions of organisms with their environments. Natural selection placed pressure on the organisms forcing adaptations to be made, hence new species to arise over time. The oversimplified image of evolution that began to form in my head involved one single organism adapting to its environment and undergoing change in its own life couple, therefore that one organism experiences evolution in action. I didnt think evolution was a process of becoming more perfect necessarily, but demote accommodate for more diverse situations, which boiled kill to being better. Obviously this picture I was conjuring up was far from the most scientifically logical, and I was surprised and impressed to hear a better explanation. Evolution is depicted as an inconceivably time- consuming and expansion-driven process it is not about survival of the fittest or being perfect, rather the most able to assert genetically variable offspring (less likely to be eliminated by natural selection). The major discrepancy between the two (oversimplified and clarified) formulations of evolution is the importance of random unlearned expansion, which arguably is a quality assigned not only to energy and matter on Earth, but also to evolution and as the entire universe. single of the simpler discrepancies in my illogical view of evolution merely involved timescale and the mechanism of change. A single organism cannot evolve within its own life span because of environmental pressure. The very first of Mayrs seventeen principles of inheritance states, genetic material is constant (hard) it cannot be change d by the environment or by use and neglectfulness of the phenotype... Genes cannot be modified by the environment... There is no inheritance of acquired characters (Mayr, 2001, p. 91). Therefore, one organism cannot possibly experience evolution in action as a result of environmental interactions. The term adaptation creates some confusion here because it is so often coupled with evolutionary change and expresses a change suited for certain environmental conditions. The fact of the matter is evolution, as well as adaptation, occur over many generations and changes are not directly related to the conditions of the environment.