Evolutionary Theory : Climate Change On Evolution

According to Darwin and his theory on evolution, organisms are presented with nature’s challenge of environmental change. Those that possess the characteristics of adapting to such challenges are successful in leaving their genes behind and ensuring that their lineage will continue. It is natural selection, where nature can perform tiny to mass sporadic experiments on its organisms, and the results can be interesting from extinction to significant changes within a species.

Animals fight for survival daily, and sometimes their lives depend on their ability to adapt with their surrounding environments. Natural Selection is the process in which individuals have certain traits that allow

Environmental adaptation, which occurs when there is a change in the environment leading to modifications that allow the organisms in that environment adapt to those changes over time, can be characterized into two levels; selection and phenotypic plasticity. Selection happens when an allele is more favorable in an environment, its frequency increases over time but when it is unfavorable, its frequency decreases. When a genotype of an organism displays different phenotypes due to the conditions of

• Be able to use the terms variation, adaptation, natural selection, and evolution as they apply to this and

A population’s genetic makeup can change through mutations, change in location, an increase in population, and an increase in mating between organisms. Breeding within species ensure the future offsprings of a particular species and creates a variations in alleles than before. The environment is related to the organism existence in a community an example is a white butterfly in a snowy region. Predictors are less likely to see the

In its basic form, the theory of evolution has been confirmed so completely that most modern biologists consider evolution simply a fact (Mayr 1982). It states that environmental factors such as climate, disease, competition from other organisms, and availability of certain types of food will lead to the preferential survival and reproduction of

1. There are many ecological and biological factors that affect evolution. In EvolutionLab, two populations of finches are tracked over the course of 300 years on two different islands to see how changing the traits of the birds and their environment affect their long term viability as a sustainable population. Let’s begin by doing a “null experiment” where conditions are identical on the two islands.

The environment determines which traits are most evolutionary desirable to an organism. If a population should move or should the environment change, a different set of traits would be the most advantageous

Biological fitness is fundamental to the evolution of species. It is defined both by survival and reproductive success, determined by the contribution to the gene pool of the next generation. Accordingly, the individual that lives the longest and produces the most fertile offspring has the highest fitness. Fitness is hereditary, genetically based, and phenotypically expressed. Natural selection acts on the translation of phenotypic trait variation to maximize performance, to improve and protect the highest fitness state and allow it to go towards fixation. The modification in the genetic makeup of a population over time correlates with an increased average fitness. However, evolution is not linear. Every behavior, every feature

In the article “The Seasons Aren’t What They Used to Be,” David George Haskell berates that fact that climate change is evident in most forms of life around us, however, humans have refused to acknowledge the obvious signs and take necessary action. Haskell is a professor of biology on the faculty of Sewanee University in Sewanee, Tennessee. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University and writes about biodiversity, evolution, and conservation. Haskell education background and experience give him the credibility to speak on the effect of climate change. Haskell’s purpose is to point out the signs of the changes in season triggered by climate change and its effect on plant, animal and human

Habitat can be considered as the optimal location where any one species can live, reproduce, and grow in an ecological time scale (Kellner et al. 1992). As the climatic conditions of the world are changing at a rapid pace, it is important to understand how species will adapt with the weather and learn to adjust their way of living. Understanding how a species survives in different climatic regions is very important for the future management of the species population and habitat. With this knowledge an individual could more efficiently manage their habitat to make it more suitable for the species to live under the given climatic conditions.

“If no such variations exist, the population rapidly goes extinct because it cannot adapt to a changing environment” (O’Neil, 1998-2013). Scientists call this reproductive success. “Within a specific environment context, one genotype will be better than another genotype in survival or reproduction for certain reasons having to do with the way its particular features relate to the environment or relate to other organisms within the population” (Futuyma, 2000-2014). The theory of evolution is explicable through various kinds of scientific research.

Some fish have been found to adapt to changing conditions in their habitat without substantial changes to their genetic code. This was found in a study done by the University of East Anglia and Dalhousie University, Canada on the Winter Skate (Leucoraja ocellata). The group of skates, in which these changes, both physiological and morphological were observed, were in an area that is now warmer than it was historically. Dr Jack Lighten from UEA's School of Environmental Sciences believes these changes are epigenetic, or derived from a change in the way the genetic code is expressed. This type of change is crucial to organisms that either live a long time or take a long time to reach reproductive maturity, because it lessens the risk of not adapting fast enough to changing conditions and subsequently going extinct.

Natural selection is considered one of the most important processes for a variety of species and the environment which allows the fittest organisms to produce offspring. To prevent a species from extinction, it is necessary for them to adapt to the surrounding environment. The species which have the ability to adapt to new surroundings will be able to pass their genes through reproduction. Within the process of natural selection, it is possible for the original genetic make-up of a species to become altered. The team will report on the different processes of basic mechanisms of evolution, how natural selection results in biodiversity and why biodiversity is important to continued evolution. The sources of genetic

Over the past few decades, the expression of a variety of life history, behavioural, and physiological traits have been correlated with systematic environmental changes in temperature, growing season length, and precipitation1,2. The assumed causal pathway in most if not all studies is that environmental changes drive changes in traits, and these changes lead to changes in fitness3. This causal model has rarely been explicitly tested and the quantitative genetic consequences of such changes in fitness are mostly unknown. Here, we close that gap by combining both a path analysis and a quantitative genetic approach on 37 years of data on a wild population of adult female yellow-bellied marmots. We demonstrate that changes in body mass were driven by the changes in spring temperature, but contrary to any expectations the increase in fitness was not caused by changes in temperature or body mass. Changes in body mass are thus not directly responsible for the observed change in population dynamic. In addition, we found a constant positive selection at the phenotypic level on body mass, a constant heritability of fitness, and a varying (but not trending) heritability of body mass. Our results clearly indicate that the changes in body mass are not due to an evolutionary response, and that evolutionary dynamics have not been modified because the fitness-body mass relation has remained constant. Global climate changes have the potential to impact dramatically multiple traits, as well