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The reason that evolutionary biology is so interesting to learn about is because of the evolutionary processes that is the reason we have such a diversity of life on Earth.There are many processes that make up evolutionary biology that give great insight to how we came to be, some of which include natural selection, speciation, and common descent.
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
The idea of evolution by natural selection was proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859, but evolutionary biology, as an academic discipline in its own right, emerged during the period of the modern synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s. [8] It was not until the 1980s that many universities had departments of evolutionary biology.
Evolutionary biology is the study of the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth, starting from a single common ancestor. These processes include natural selection, common descent, and speciation. Evolutionary psychology is the study of psychological structures from a modern evolutionary perspective.
E. O. Wilson defined sociobiology as "the extension of population biology and evolutionary theory to social organization". [6]Sociobiology is based on the premise that some behaviors (social and individual) are at least partly inherited and can be affected by natural selection. [7]
The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism—often expressed using Ernst Haeckel's phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—is a historical hypothesis that the development of the embryo of an animal, from fertilization to gestation or hatching (), goes through stages resembling or representing successive adult stages in the evolution of the ...
Alternatives to Darwinian evolution have been proposed by scholars investigating biology to explain signs of evolution and the relatedness of different groups of living things. The alternatives in question do not deny that evolutionary changes over time are the origin of the diversity of life, nor that the organisms alive today share a common ...
Evolutionary physiology is the study of the biological evolution of physiological structures and processes; that is, the manner in which the functional characteristics of organisms have responded to natural selection or sexual selection or changed by random genetic drift across multiple generations during the history of a population or species. [2]