Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In biology, homology is similarity in anatomical structures or genes between organisms of different taxa due to shared ancestry, regardless of current functional differences. Evolutionary biology explains homologous structures as retained heredity from a common ancestor after having been subjected to adaptive modifications for different ...
The science began in the classical era, continuing in the early modern period with work by Pierre Belon who noted the similarities of the skeletons of birds and humans. Comparative anatomy has provided evidence of common descent , and has assisted in the classification of animals.
Tail end of human embryo, from eight and a half to nine weeks old. 1 - 7: Homologous male and female pelvic organs. Diagrams that show the development of male and female organs from a common precursor.
Sequence homology is the biological homology between DNA, RNA, or protein sequences, defined in terms of shared ancestry in the evolutionary history of life. Two segments of DNA can have shared ancestry because of three phenomena: either a speciation event (orthologs), or a duplication event (paralogs), or else a horizontal (or lateral) gene ...
Vestigial structures and comparisons in embryonic development are largely a contributing factor in anatomical resemblance in concordance with common descent. Since metabolic processes do not leave fossils, research into the evolution of the basic cellular processes is done largely by comparison of existing organisms' physiology and biochemistry .
Whereas ordinary homology is seen in the pattern of structures such as limb bones of mammals that are evidently related, deep homology can apply to groups of animals that have quite dissimilar anatomy: vertebrates (with endoskeletons made of bone and cartilage) and arthropods (with exoskeletons made of chitin) nevertheless have limbs that are constructed using similar recipes or "algorithms".
Gross anatomy (also called topographical anatomy, regional anatomy, or anthropotomy) is the study of anatomical structures that can be seen by the naked eye. [1] Microscopic anatomy is the study of minute anatomical structures assisted with microscopes , which includes histology (the study of the organization of tissues), [ 1 ] and cytology ...
Both of these properties (i.e., the length of chromosomal arms, and the placement of the chromosomal centromere) are the main factors for creating structural homology between chromosomes. Therefore, when two chromosomes containing the relatively same structure exist (e.g., maternal chromosome 15 and paternal chromosome 15), they are able to ...