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Waddington called the effect he had seen "genetic assimilation". His explanation was that it was caused by a process he called "canalization".He compared embryonic development to a ball rolling down a slope in what he called an epigenetic landscape, where each point on the landscape is a possible state of the organism (involving many variables).
Assimilation is the process of absorption of vitamins, minerals, and other chemicals from food as part of the nutrition of an organism. In humans, this is always done with a chemical breakdown ( enzymes and acids ) and physical breakdown (oral mastication and stomach churning).
Through this process of genetic assimilation, an environmentally induced phenotype had become inherited. Waddington explained this as the formation of a new canal in the epigenetic landscape. It is, however, possible to explain genetic assimilation using only quantitative genetics and a threshold model, with no reference to the concept of ...
The Baldwin effect has been confused with, and sometimes conflated with, a different evolutionary theory also based on phenotypic plasticity, C. H. Waddington's genetic assimilation. The Baldwin effect includes genetic accommodation, of which one type is genetic assimilation. [28]
Biological carbon fixation, or сarbon assimilation, is the process by which living organisms convert inorganic carbon (particularly carbon dioxide) to organic compounds. These organic compounds are then used to store energy and as structures for other biomolecules .
Sulfur assimilation is the process by which living organisms incorporate sulfur into their biological molecules. [1] In plants, sulfate is absorbed by the roots and then transported to the chloroplasts by the transipration stream where the sulfur are reduced to sulfide with the help of a series of enzymatic reactions .
Nitrogen assimilation is the formation of organic nitrogen compounds like amino acids from inorganic nitrogen compounds present in the environment. Organisms like plants , fungi and certain bacteria that can fix nitrogen gas (N 2 ) depend on the ability to assimilate nitrate or ammonia for their needs.
This occurs when the populations already have some reproductive isolation, but still hybridize to some extent. Because hybridization is costly (e.g. giving birth and raising a weak offspring), natural selection favors strong isolation mechanisms that can avoid such outcome, such as assortative mating. [ 5 ]