CHEM 110 Lecture Notes - Chromosome, Zebra Finch, Sexual Selection

• School: McGill University
• Department: Chemistry
• Course: CHEM 110
• Professor: Rick Schultz

Document Summary

Darwin went on a 5-year-long voyage and made a lot of observations. England, in 1836, he tried to understand and analyze these observations. He developed the major features of an explanatory theory for evolutionary change based on two major propositions: species are not immutable; they change over time, the process that produces these changes is natural selection. Darwin observed that although offspring tend to resemble their parents, the offspring of most organisms are not identical to one another or to their parents. He suggests slight variations among individuals affect the chance that a given individuals will survive and reproduce natural selection: differential contribution of offspring to the next generation by various genetic types belonging to the same population. It is important to remember that individuals do not evolve; populations do. A population is a group of individuals of a single species that live and interbreed in a particular geographic area at the same time: adaptation has two meanings.