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Waddington called the effect he had seen "genetic assimilation". His explanation was that it was caused by a process he called "canalization".He compared embryonic development to a ball rolling down a slope in what he called an epigenetic landscape, where each point on the landscape is a possible state of the organism (involving many variables).
Acclimatization occurs in a short period of time (hours to weeks), and within the organism's lifetime (compared to adaptation, which is evolution, taking place over many generations). This may be a discrete occurrence (for example, when mountaineers acclimate to high altitude over hours or days) or may instead represent part of a periodic cycle ...
The Baldwin effect compared to Lamarck's theory of evolution, Darwinian evolution, and Waddington's genetic assimilation. All the theories offer explanations of how organisms respond to a changed environment with adaptive inherited change. In evolutionary biology, the Baldwin effect describes an effect of learned behaviour on evolution.
Adaptation is a major topic in the philosophy of biology, as it concerns function and purpose . Some biologists try to avoid terms which imply purpose in adaptation, not least because it suggests a deity's intentions, but others note that adaptation is necessarily purposeful.
Assimilation is the process of absorption of vitamins, minerals, and other chemicals from food as part of the nutrition of an organism. In humans, this is always done with a chemical breakdown ( enzymes and acids ) and physical breakdown (oral mastication and stomach churning).
Adaptationism is an approach to studying the evolution of form and function. It attempts to frame the existence and persistence of traits, assuming that each of them arose independently and improved the reproductive success of the organism's ancestors.
However, even if the original value of α is accurate for a particular time period, this extrapolation is still invalid. This is because there has been a large acceleration in the amount of positive selection in the human lineage over the last 40,000 years, in terms of the number of genes that have undergone adaptive evolution (Hawks et al. 2007).
This glossary of biology terms is a list of definitions of fundamental terms and concepts used in biology, the study of life and of living organisms.It is intended as introductory material for novices; for more specific and technical definitions from sub-disciplines and related fields, see Glossary of cell biology, Glossary of genetics, Glossary of evolutionary biology, Glossary of ecology ...