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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 ...
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
The basic mechanisms of evolution are applied directly or indirectly to come up with novel designs or solve problems that are difficult to solve otherwise. The research generated in these applied fields, contribute towards progress, especially from work on evolution in computer science and engineering fields such as mechanical engineering. [5]
The trackway Protichnites from the Cambrian, Blackberry Hill, central Wisconsin. A trace fossil, also known as an ichnofossil (/ ˈ ɪ k n oʊ f ɒ s ɪ l /; from Greek: ἴχνος ikhnos "trace, track"), is a fossil record of biological activity by lifeforms but not the preserved remains of the organism itself. [1]
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.
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 ...
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.