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The history of the camel provides an example of how fossil evidence can be used to reconstruct migration and subsequent evolution. The fossil record indicates that the evolution of camelids started in North America (see figure 4e), from which, six million years ago, they migrated across the Bering Strait into Asia and then to Africa, and 3.5 ...
The functionality of LUCA as well as evidence for the early evolution of membrane-dependent biological systems together suggest that LUCA had cellularity and cell membranes. [19] As for the cell's structure, it contained a water-based cytoplasm effectively enclosed by a lipid bilayer membrane; it was capable of reproducing by cell division. [ 10 ]
Direct reciprocity was proposed by Robert Trivers as a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation. [1] If there are repeated encounters between the same two players in an evolutionary game in which each of them can choose either to "cooperate" or "defect", then a strategy of mutual cooperation may be favoured even if it pays each player, in the short term, to defect when the other cooperates.
Evidence for any such direction in evolution is however hard to acquire and can also result from developmental constraints that limit diversification. [47] For example, in the gastropods , the snail-type shell is always built as a tube that grows both in length and in diameter; selection has created a wide variety of shell shapes such as flat ...
Molecular evolution describes how inherited DNA and/or RNA change over evolutionary time, and the consequences of this for proteins and other components of cells and organisms. Molecular evolution is the basis of phylogenetic approaches to describing the tree of life. Molecular evolution overlaps with population genetics, especially on shorter ...
Mosaic evolution – Evolution of characters at various rates both within and between species; Parallel evolution – Similar evolution in distinct species; Quantum evolution – Evolution where transitional forms are particularly unstable and do not last long; Recurrent evolution – The repeated evolution of a particular character
Common descent is a concept in evolutionary biology applicable when one species is the ancestor of two or more species later in time. According to modern evolutionary biology, all living beings could be descendants of a unique ancestor commonly referred to as the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all life on Earth.
For example, evolutionary thinking is key to life history theory. Annotation of genes and their function relies heavily on comparative, that is evolutionary, approaches. The field of evolutionary developmental biology investigates how developmental processes work by using the comparative method to determine how they evolved.