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According to Ernst Mayr, professor of zoology at Harvard University, Darwin's most distinct contributions to evolutionary biology and ecology are as follows: "The first is the non-constancy of species, or the modern conception of evolution itself. The second is the notion of branching evolution, implying the common descent of all species of ...
Eutely has been confirmed to certain degrees in various forms of diversity and sections of the tree of life.Examples include rotifers, many species of nematodes (including ascaris and the organism Caenorhabditis elegans whose male individuals have 1,033 cells [3] [4]), tardigrades, larvaceans and dicyemida.
When the species abundances of an ecological system are treated with a set of differential equations, it is possible to test for stability by linearizing the system at the equilibrium point. [7] Robert May used this stability analysis in the 1970s which uses the Jacobian matrix or community matrix to investigate the relation between the ...
Flower constancy favors flower pollination, that is, pollinators that are flower constant are more likely to transfer pollen to other conspecific plants. [8] Also, flower constancy prevents the loss of pollen during interspecific flights and pollinators from clogging stigmas with pollen of other flower species. [2]
In an influential paper, Wiens and Donoghue [3] laid out how phylogenetic niche conservatism might help explain the latitudinal diversity gradient.While support for the hypothesis that niche conservatism drives latitudinally structured variation in species richness has been found in some clades, [11] overall, phylogenetic niche conservatism has not received strong support as the underlying ...
Resistance is one of the major aspects of ecological stability.Volker Grimm and Christian Wissel identified 70 terms and 163 distinct definitions of the various aspects of ecological stability, but found that they could be reduced to three fundamental properties: "staying essentially unchanged", "returning to the reference state...after a temporary disturbance" and "persistence through time of ...
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution (the idea that species arose through descent with modification from a single common ancestor in a process driven by natural selection) initially met opposition from scientists with different ...
Natura non saltum facit (literally, "Nature does not make a jump") is a variant form, sometimes attributed to Gottfried Leibniz. [9] Natura non facit saltum is also the epigraph of Alfred Marshall's 1890 Principles of Economics. He most likely borrowed the phrase from Darwin's The Origin of Species. [10]