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The concept of common descent is fundamental to the study of evolution, phylogenetics, and cladistics; for instance, all clades, by definition, are rooted in a common ancestor. See also most recent common ancestor. competitive gametic isolation complex trait See quantitative trait. congruent clines
The following is a list of common metonyms. [n 1] A metonym is a figure of speech used in rhetoric in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept.
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 ...
However, current evidence in the fossil record supports the concept of mass extinctions. As a result, the general idea of catastrophism has re-emerged as a valid hypothesis for at least some of the rapid changes in life forms that appear in the fossil records.
Carcinisation (American English: carcinization) is a form of convergent evolution in which non-crab crustaceans evolve a crab-like body plan. The term was introduced into evolutionary biology by L. A. Borradaile, who described it as "the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab". [2]
The Black Queen hypothesis is a theory of reductive evolution that suggests natural selection can drive organisms to reduce their genome size. [37] In other words, a gene that confers a vital biological function can become dispensable for an individual organism if its community members express that gene in a "leaky" fashion.
Evolution is the central unifying concept in biology. Biology can be divided into various ways. Biology can be divided into various ways. One way is by the level of biological organization , from molecular to cell , organism to population .
The first five editions of Darwin's in Origin of Species used the word "evolved", but the word "evolution" was only used in its sixth edition in 1872. [8] By then, Herbert Spencer had developed the concept theory that organisms strive to evolve due to an internal "driving force" ( orthogenesis ) in 1862. [ 7 ]