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The origin of eukaryotic endosymbiosis is a more dramatic example. [23] All adaptations help organisms survive in their ecological niches. The adaptive traits may be structural, behavioural or physiological. Structural adaptations are physical features of an organism, such as shape, body covering, armament, and internal organization.
Animals that live in groups often give alarm calls that give warning of an attack. For example, vervet monkeys give different calls depending on the nature of the attack: for an eagle, a disyllabic cough; for a leopard or other cat, a loud bark; for a python or other snake, a "chutter". The monkeys hearing these calls respond defensively, but ...
The science writer Philip Ball states that Thompson "presents mathematical principles as a shaping agency that may supersede natural selection, showing how the structures of the living world often echo those in inorganic nature", and notes his "frustration at the 'Just So' explanations of morphology offered by Darwinians."
Cuckoos are a canonical example; the female cuckoo has its offspring raised by a bird of a different species, cutting down the biological mother's parental investment. The ability to lay eggs that mimic the host eggs is the key adaptation. The adaptation to different hosts is inherited through the female line in so-called gentes (gens, singular).
Charles Darwin. The idea that the function of a trait might shift during its evolutionary history originated with Charles Darwin (Darwin 1859).For many years the phenomenon was labeled "preadaptation", but since this term suggests teleology in biology, appearing to conflict with natural selection, it has been replaced by the term "exaptation".
A so-called "cathedral" mound produced by a termite colony. Structures built by non-human animals, often called animal architecture, [1] are common in many species. Examples of animal structures include termite mounds, ant hills, wasp and beehives, burrow complexes, beaver dams, elaborate nests of birds, and webs of spiders.
The etymology of the word "morphology" is from the Ancient Greek μορφή (morphḗ), meaning "form", and λόγος (lógos), meaning "word, study, research". [2] [3]While the concept of form in biology, opposed to function, dates back to Aristotle (see Aristotle's biology), the field of morphology was developed by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1790) and independently by the German anatomist ...
Structural biology deals with structural analysis of living material (formed, composed of, and/or maintained and refined by living cells) at every level of organization. [ 1 ] Early structural biologists throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries were primarily only able to study structures to the limit of the naked eye's visual acuity and ...