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[17] [18] They argued further that there was a "pre-Mendelian" phase of the evolution of animals, involving physical forces, before genes took over. [ 17 ] [ 19 ] Darwinian biologists freely admit that physical factors such as surface tension can cause self-assembly , but insist that genes play a crucial role.
The book's somewhat controversial [1] argument is that evolution in animals (though no doubt similar processes occur in other organisms) proceeds mostly by modifying the way that regulatory genes, which do not code for structural proteins (such as enzymes), control embryonic development.
Adaptationism is an approach to studying the evolution of form and function. It attempts to frame the existence and persistence of traits, assuming that each of them arose independently and improved the reproductive success of the organism's ancestors.
Evolutionary taxonomy arose as a result of the influence of the theory of evolution on Linnaean taxonomy. The idea of translating Linnaean taxonomy into a sort of dendrogram of the Animal and Plant kingdoms was formulated toward the end of the 18th century, well before Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species was published. [4]
Two useful introductions to the fundamental theory underlying the unit of selection issue and debate, which also present examples of multi-level selection from the entire range of the biological hierarchy (typically with entities at level N-1 competing for increased representation, i.e., higher frequency, at the immediately higher level N, e.g., organisms in populations or cell lineages in ...
The article was the first announcement of the Darwin–Wallace theory of evolution by natural selection; and appeared in print on 20 August 1858. The presentation of the papers spurred Darwin to write a condensed "abstract" of his "big book", Natural Selection. This was published in November 1859 as On the Origin of Species.
The evolution of biological complexity is one important outcome of the process of evolution. [1] Evolution has produced some remarkably complex organisms – although the actual level of complexity is very hard to define or measure accurately in biology, with properties such as gene content, the number of cell types or morphology all proposed as possible metrics.
The fossil record includes well documented examples of both phyletic gradualism and punctuational evolution. [17] As such, much debate persists over the prominence of stasis in the fossil record. [ 18 ] [ 19 ] Before punctuated equilibrium, most evolution biologists considered stasis to be rare or unimportant.