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macroevolution – macromutation – The Major Transitions in Evolution – maladaptation – The Malay Archipelago – mass extinctions – mating systems – John Maynard Smith – Ernst Mayr – Gregor Mendel – memetics – Mendelian inheritance – Mesozoic–Cenozoic radiation – microevolution – micropaleontology (a.k.a. micropaleobiology) – Miller–Urey experiment – mimicry ...
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution holds that all species are related and gradually change over generations. [1]
Also called functionalism. The Darwinian view that many or most physiological and behavioral traits of organisms are adaptations that have evolved for specific functions or for specific reasons (as opposed to being byproducts of the evolution of other traits, consequences of biological constraints, or the result of random variation). adaptive radiation The simultaneous or near-simultaneous ...
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
Evolutionists expected one part to change at a time, one change to follow another. In Cuvier's view, evolution was impossible, as any one change would unbalance the whole delicate system. [11] Louis Agassiz's 1856 "Essay on Classification" exemplified German philosophical idealism. This held that each species was complex within itself, had ...
Evolutionary epistemology refers to three distinct topics: (1) the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, (2) a theory that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection, and (3) the study of the historical discovery of new abstract entities such as abstract number or abstract value that necessarily precede the individual acquisition and usage of such abstractions.
Extended evolutionary synthesis – Set of theoretical concepts concerning evolutionary biology; Current research – Study of the evolution of life; By field Evolutionary developmental biology – Comparison of organism developmental processes; History of evolutionary psychology; History of molecular evolution – History of the field of study
William S. Cooper, in his 2001 book The Evolution of Reason: Logic as a Branch of Biology, illustrates how logical rules are derived directly from evolutionary principles. [14] Evolution as computation is a concept explored by John Mayfield in his 2013 book The Engine of Complexity: Evolution as Computation. He synthesizes core concepts from ...