BISC208- Midterm Exam Guide - Comprehensive Notes for the exam ( 33 pages long!)
12 Oct 2017
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Natural selection explains how populations become well suited to their environments over time. The heritable characteristics of populations change over time. Special creation claimed: all species are independent (not related to each other, life on earth is young (perhaps just 6000 years, species are immutable (incapable of change) Scientific theories usually have two components: pattern, process. Plato claimed that every organism was an example of a perfect essence, or type, created by god, and that these types were unchanging: philosophers and biologists refer to this as typological thinking. Aristotle ordered the types of organisms known at the time into a linear scheme called the great chain of being: proposed that species were fixed types organized into a sequence based on increased size and complexity. Lamarck claimed species change through time via the inheritance of acquired characters: an individual develops as its phenotype changes in response to challenges posed by the environment and it passes these phenotypic changes onto offspring.
