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The search space is only part of an evolutionary landscape. The final component is the "y-axis", which is usually fitness. Each value along the search space can result in a high or low fitness for the entity. [1] If small movements through search space cause changes in fitness that are relatively small, then the landscape is considered smooth.
Aristotle considered whether different forms could have appeared, only the useful ones surviving.. Several philosophers of the classical era, including Empedocles [1] and his intellectual successor, the Roman poet Lucretius, [2] expressed the idea that nature produces a huge variety of creatures, randomly, and that only those creatures that manage to provide for themselves and reproduce ...
In the latter half of the twentieth century, social scientists debated whether human behaviour was the product of nature (genes) or nurture (environment in the developmental period, including culture). An example of interaction (as distinct from the sum of the components) involves familiarity from childhood.
Nature versus nurture is a long-standing debate in biology and society about the relative influence on human beings of their genetic inheritance (nature) and the environmental conditions of their development .
Beginning of animal evolution. [54] [55] 720–630 Ma Possible global glaciation [56] [57] which increased the atmospheric oxygen and decreased carbon dioxide, and was either caused by land plant evolution [58] or resulted in it. [59] Opinion is divided on whether it increased or decreased biodiversity or the rate of evolution. [60] [61] [62 ...
Neutral networks are a subset of the sequences in sequence space that have equivalent function, and so form a wide, flat plateau in a fitness landscape. Neutral evolution can therefore be visualised as a population diffusing from one set of sequence nodes, through the neutral network, to another cluster of sequence nodes.
At the most fundamental level, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution states that organisms evolve and adapt to their environment by an iterative process. This process can be conceived as an evolutionary algorithm that searches the space of possible forms (the fitness landscape) for the ones that are best adapted. The process has three components:
Evolution can be extremely rapid, as shown in the creation of domesticated animals and plants in a very short geological space of time, spanning only a few tens of thousands of years. Maize ( Zea mays ), for instance, was created in Mexico in only a few thousand years, starting about 7,000 to 12,000 years ago. [ 88 ]