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In another study concerning morphological trends and rates of evolution found that the European arvicolid rodent radiated into 52 distinct lineages over a time frame of 5 million years while documenting examples of phyletic gradualism, punctuation, and stasis.
Convergent evolution—the repeated evolution of similar traits in multiple lineages which all ancestrally lack the trait—is rife in nature, as illustrated by the examples below. The ultimate cause of convergence is usually a similar evolutionary biome , as similar environments will select for similar traits in any species occupying the same ...
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.
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 .
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
A recently observed example has as protagonists M. xanthus (predator) and E. coli (prey) in which a parallel evolution of both species can be observed through genomic and phenotypic modifications, producing in future generations a better adaptation of one of the species that is counteracted by the evolution of the other, thus generating an arms ...
In biology, evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological organisms over generations due to natural selection, mutation, gene flow, and genetic drift. Also known as descent with modification .
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 ...