BIOLOGY 1B Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Marine Iguana, Flightless Cormorant, Galapagos Land Iguana
11 Jun 2018
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Department
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Professor
Lecture 2: Explanatory Power of Evolutionary Theory
Alexander von Humboldt:
• Traveled to areas that had not been studied before
• Surveyed plants as altitude increased on mountains and found information important to basis of plant bio
• Inspired other people from this time, including Darwin, to voyage and discover
Charles Darwin:
• As a young person, not good at school. Didn’t enjoy structure of education. Liked to collect beetles.
Naturalist and explorer from the beginning
• Influenced by Henslo (botanist instructor)
• Decided to become a pastor so he could study biology and teach some days
• Went on voyage on boat called HMS Beagle for 5 years
o Covered a lot of ground
o Started in England and traveled to Brazil then surveyed shoreline of South America, then up to the
Galapagos
o Collected fossils and modern animals
• Darwin’s law of the succession of types: progression from fossils to modern organisms
o Found bones of old animals that have very similar bone structures to armadillo
▪ Strikes Darwin as unlikely or unexpected
▪ There are creatures that are only in a certain region of the world and fossils similar to
these modern creatures only found in this region
▪ How does this relate to special creation?
• Galapagos Islands and endemic fauna
o Volcanos that erupted and formed islands
o Close to South America but not very close so not too many animals can fly there form South
America
o Marine iguanas
▪ Darwin has seen land iguanas but not marine iguanas
▪ Why is the marine iguana on the island close to the area with the most iguana population
(South America)?
o Galapagos tortoise
▪ Each island has unique tortoise with different shaped shell
▪ Darwin did not label which tortoise came from which island
o Flightless cormorant
▪ On Mainland: Two full wings, flies above water
▪ On Islands: wings cannot fly, can swim, long bill to catch fish
o Coral Atoll: Mo’orea is an island that may be early formation of a coral atoll
▪ Mo’orea eroded fast due to volcano
▪ Ring of coral with basin in middle
▪ Subsidence of land hypothesis: Volcanic island erupting, erosion leads to fringing reef
creating a barrier reef which subsidizes to coral atoll
o Morphological convergence: Similar forms of organisms in different land areas among animals
that are not closely related
▪ Similar but anatomically different
▪ Form fits function but different evolutionary backgrounds
o I think drawing: Has one starting point and branches that depict extinctions and A, B, C, and D
points representing different species
Alfred Russel Wallace
• Worked alongside Darwin as a contemporary scientist
• Goes to Amazon to collect
o Emphasis on insects and butterflies
o Sells his collections
• Goes to Indonesia
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Alexander von humboldt: traveled to areas that had not been studied before, surveyed plants as altitude increased on mountains and found information important to basis of plant bio. Inspired other people from this time, including darwin, to voyage and discover. Charles darwin: as a young person, not good at school. I think drawing: has one starting point and branches that depict extinctions and a, b, c, and d points representing different species. Thomas malthus: an essay on the principle of population- how human communities are growing with respect to time in. England; exponential growth whereas resources are growing with a lesser slope so the amount of people greatly exceeds resources. Malthus predicts the amount of people will greatly strip the amount of resources: darwin and wallace take this and apply this to other animal populations, ex. Individual variation: variations are heritable: inheritance, can selectively breed, preservation of favored traits.
