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An early advocate of the niche construction perspective in biology was the developmental biologist, Conrad Waddington. He drew his attention to the many ways in which animals modify their selective environments throughout their lives, by choosing and changing their environmental conditions, a phenomenon that he termed "the exploitive system". [14]
As another example, the anole lizards of the Greater Antilles are a rare example of convergent evolution, adaptive radiation, and the existence of ecological equivalents: the anole lizards evolved in similar microhabitats independently of each other and resulted in the same ecomorphs across all four islands.
Many found the early examples unconvincing and suggested it to be a rare phenomenon. Criticisms with earlier studies included the lack of rigor in statistical analyses and the use of poorly rationalized characters. [5] [8] Additionally, theory seemed to indicate that the conditions that allowed character displacement to occur were limited. [8]
Edward Hitchcock's fold-out paleontological chart in his 1840 Elementary Geology. Although tree-like diagrams have long been used to organise knowledge, and although branching diagrams known as claves ("keys") were omnipresent in eighteenth-century natural history, it appears that the earliest tree diagram of natural order was the 1801 "Arbre botanique" (Botanical Tree) of the French ...
In biology, evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organization , from kingdoms to species , and individual organisms and molecules , such as DNA and proteins .
The water cycle, is the continuous movement of water on, above, and below the surface of the Earth. Water can change states among liquid, vapour, and ice at various places in the water cycle. Although the balance of water on Earth remains fairly constant over time, individual water molecules can come and go.
The etymology of the word "morphology" is from the Ancient Greek μορφή (morphḗ), meaning "form", and λόγος (lógos), meaning "word, study, research". [2] [3]While the concept of form in biology, opposed to function, dates back to Aristotle (see Aristotle's biology), the field of morphology was developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1790) and independently by the German anatomist ...
The sedimentary record allows scientists to observe changes in life and Earth in composition over time and sometimes even date major transitions, like extinction events. Some classic examples of geobiology in the sedimentary record include stromatolites and banded-iron formations. The role of life in the origin of both of these is a heavily ...