The Fittest : A New Era Of Observation And Evolutionary Thinking

Daniel Ridgway Knight was an odd American artist who loved to paint relaxed French peasants in luscious landscapes. Ironically, he lived during a stressful time when the Industrial Revolution displaced numerous farmers and polluted the environment. He seemed to ignore the harsh truth and shut himself in his imaginary serene world. For instance, In the Premier Chagrin, translated as The First Grief, Knight paints two healthy girls conversing on a stone wall in front of gorgeous fields. At first, it appears as merely a pretty painting that is nicely contrasted to show depth and realism. Yet, with a closer look, this contrast in the colors and lines of the landscape and the figures creates tension to suggest the painter’s conflict between longing for serene freedom and feeling trapped within the stiff society.

Evolutionary biology has always interested me, specifically the mechanisms of natural selection and how species adapt to their environment. It started with my love for animals and nature when I was little. I spent my summers working with horses at a local corral, where I would ride around the surrounding wilderness areas. My favorite part about riding in the mountains was watching the change in plant and animal species as the elevation changed. It never ceased to amaze me how the alpine tree line was always so sudden. Humongous pine trees would give way to the short, shrubby plants of the alpine tundra so uniformly and noticeably. I have always wondered about the environmental conditions that cause species to distribute themselves in

In this experiment you will be examining the effect of a dominant mutation that changes how the organism obtains food.

Heterozygosity is the measure of the genetic variation in a population at a particular gene locus. Genetic variation within a population is important in maintaining or increasing the fitness of members in the population and ultimately the survival of the species.

Before I describe my interpretation of “natural selection,” it is necessary to define “knowledge,” which, in terms of this essay, is an idea or technology developed to improve the lives, and has been shown to do so. I interpreted the scientific term “natural selection,” to better

Natural selection states that those organisms that have characteristics that best suit to the environment will survive, reproduce and pass some characteristics to their offspring. In any population that reproduces sexually, there are large variations of inheritable characteristics. If various groups of the same species become isolated from each other, the environments in which the groups are isolated may result into different characteristics to suit that particular

Introduction To Evolution What is Evolution? Evolution is the process by which all living things have developed from primitive organisms through changes occurring over billions of years, a process that includes all animals and plants. Exactly how evolution occurs is still a matter of debate, but there are many different theories and that it occurs is a scientific fact. Biologists agree that all living things come through a long history of changes shaped by physical and chemical processes that are still taking place.

Ernst Berliner separated microscopic organisms which killed a Mediterranean flour moth in late 1911. In 1911 BT was rediscovered and named it as Bacillus thuringiensis after the German town Thuringia where the moth was found. In 1901 the name bacterium bacillus sotto was named from Ishiwatari. The benefits and risks correlated with utilizing BT proteins as a part of cultivating and utilizing BT gens as a part of GMO products to fabricate the characteristic insecticides spray. This normal insecticides spray is delivered by the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (called "Bt") that has been utilized for quite a long time by natural agriculturists to control yield eating insects and by the World Health Organization to kill mosquitoes without utilizing

Life is evolution. Humans continuously try to keep up with the latest trends in an attempt to remain relevant in society. In the past ten years, humans have evolved immensely with the introduction, development, and integration of technology into their culture. Virtually everything can be found on the internet. Pictures and documents are being shared through cloud storage rather than being shared directly with a physical document, and doing homework online is now the norm. People have adapted to the new age, and those who have not adapted are being left behind--this is where the theory of natural selection meets modern cognitive science. Steven Pinker, the author of How The Mind Works, argues that the concept of natural selection is not as linear as society may think it is with today’s information. There is more to evolution than straightforward “survival of the fittest”. Using his background knowledge in cognitive science and the social sciences, Pinker links the biological approach to evolution with his cognitive science approach in an attempt to generate a new perspective to the theory of evolution. Steven Pinker supports his claim that the concept of natural selection is more than a simple biological adaptation, but rather a combination between biological adaptation and an adaptation to the “cognitive niche”, with historical observations, analogical evidence, and exploitation of archaeological evidence.

Understanding good design requires addressing the question of what units undergo natural selection, thereby becoming adapted (Shelton, 2014). There is a natural connection between the formal Darwinism project (which aims to connect population genetics with the evolution of design and fitness) and levels of selection issues, such as natural selection acting on individuals, or on populations (Shelton, 2014). Darwin offers contradictory ideas of thinking concerning these levels of selection (Shelton, 2014).

In most cases sexual difference are with in species may intersexual or intrasexual, but according to Darwin there are other ways sexual difference can occur in a species. Within the species sexual difference can based on the genetics and the their genotypes. The species sexual difference can be based on what traits are being expressed. Take for instance the sex chromosomes where males posses the XY chromosome and females posses the ZY chromosome. When evaluating the chromosome in mammals, males have a penis to ejaculate sperm and females have mammary glands to produce milk for the young.

Survival of the fit(-test) ties together with Darwin’s theory of natural selection. All species evolve, as it is usually the only way to survive. Some species evolve to better themselves, such as the sea slug, who steals genes from its food (i.e. algae genes would allow it to live off of sunlight for a few days). Other species evolve to survive and get more food, such as Galapagos finches, who evolved to have smaller beaks to eat smaller seeds (this is because larger birds with larger beaks ate all of the bigger seeds, thus causing an evolution). Different species evolved to protect themselves, such as blue mussels, who thicken their shells when predators come close (mostly Asian

A popular focus for evolutionary research has been the evolution of the human brain. Such research has sought to answer the questions of why our brains evolved to be as large as they are and how this increase in brain size came to be, given the massive energy requirements of neural tissue. Encephalization quotients refer to the size of the brain compared to the size of the body; as brain size increases and body size decreases, the encephalization quotient becomes larger. As would be expected, homo sapiens possess the largest encephalization quotient of all known species on Earth, being 6 times larger than the average mammal (Martin). The evolution of larger brains, which are more metabolically expensive, was made possible by a reduction in

Adaptationism is the belief that the traits seen in organisms are the results of evolution by natural selection. There are different forms of adaptationism and many different definitions as to what an adaptation is, with some believing it is impossible to test a hypothesis about an adaptation at all. This essay will look at a) how to define adaptation b) different forms of adaptationism and c) consider the different methods of testing whether a phenotype is an adaptation.

    Anton Chekhov uses The Cherry Orchard, to openly present the decline of an aristocratic Russian family as a microcosm of the rapid decline of the old Russia at the end of the nineteenth century--but also provides an ominous foreshadowing of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in the disparate ideals of his characters, Trofimov and Lopakhin, however unintentionally. The Gayev family and their plight is intended as a symbolic microcosm of the fall of the aristocracy in society at large. Though the merchant Lopakhin is presented as the character who holds values of the new, post-aristocratic age, the student Trofimov espouses the political sentiments that will ultimately replace both the