Expansion and the Evolutionary Lottery :: Evolution Essays

Expansion and the Evolutionary LotteryFor a young scholar learning the basic concepts of science and biology, ontogeny was this grand theory of past life becoming more like present life over time via the utilization of such complicated and foretaste means as natural survival and survival of the fittest. I came to understand that there was endless diversity of life, and variation was a result of the interactions of organisms with their environments. Natural selection placed pressure on the organisms forcing adaptations to be made, hence new species to arise over time. The oversimplified image of phylogenesis that began to form in my head involved maven single organism adapting to its environment and undergoing change in its own life span, therefore that one organism experiences evolution in action. I didnt think evolution was a process of becoming more perfect necessarily, but better suited for more diverse situations, which boiled down to being better. Obviously this try I was c onjuring up was far from the most scientifically logical, and I was surprised and impressed to hear a better explanation. Evolution is depicted as an inconceivably time- consuming and expansion-driven process it is not about survival of the fittest or being perfect, rather the most able to produce genetically variable payoff (less likely to be eliminated by natural selection). The major discrepancy between the two (oversimplified and clarified) formulations of evolution is the importance of random innate expansion, which arguably is a tonicity assigned not only to energy and matter on Earth, but also to evolution and as the entire universe. One of the simpler discrepancies in my illogical intellection of evolution merely involved timescale and the mechanism of change. A single organism cannot evolve within its own life span because of environmental pressure. The very start-off of Mayrs seventeen principles of inheritance states, genetic material is constant (hard) it cannot be c hanged by the environment or by use and disuse of the phenotype... Genes cannot be modified by the environment... There is no inheritance of acquired characters (Mayr, 2001, p. 91). Therefore, one organism cannot possibly experience evolution in action as a result of environmental interactions. The margin adaptation creates some confusion here because it is so often coupled with evolutionary change and expresses a change suited for certain environmental conditions. The occurrence of the matter is evolution, as well as adaptation, occur over many generations and changes are not directly related to the conditions of the environment.