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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.
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]
"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." — Lewis Carroll [4]. In 1973, Leigh Van Valen proposed the hypothesis as an "explanatory tangent" to explain the "law of extinction" known as "Van Valen's law", [1] which states that the probability of extinction does not depend on the lifetime of the species or higher-rank taxon, instead being constant ...
The development and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria provides evidence that evolution due to natural selection is an ongoing process in the natural world. Natural selection is ubiquitous in all research pertaining to evolution, taking note of the fact that all of the following examples in each section of the article document the process.
In other words, microevolution is the scale of evolution that is limited to intraspecific (within-species) variation, while macroevolution extends to interspecific (between-species) variation. [4] The evolution of new species is an example of macroevolution. This is the common definition for 'macroevolution' used by contemporary scientists.
The theory of recapitulation, also called the biogenetic law or embryological parallelism—often expressed using Ernst Haeckel's phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—is a historical hypothesis that the development of the embryo of an animal, from fertilization to gestation or hatching (), goes through stages resembling or representing successive adult stages in the evolution of the ...
Why Evolution is True is a popular science book by American biologist Jerry Coyne.It was published in 2009, dubbed "Darwin Year" as it marked the bicentennial of Charles Darwin and the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection.
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