BILD 3 Lecture 2: 1-13-17 lecture notes 2
Document Summary
All organisms are related through descent from an ancestor that lived in the remote past. Defines what evolution is, heritable change through time. In the darwinian view, the history of life is like a tree with multiple branchings from a common trunk to the tips of the youngest twigs that represent the diversity of living organisms. This view explains the hierarchal relationships in linnaean classification. Descent with modification, or evolution, describes the changes of organisms through time. Natural selection is the process that leads to adaptation. Observation #1: for any species, population sizes would increase exponentially. If all individuals that are born reproduced successfully. Observation #2: nonetheless, populations tend to be stable in size. Inference #1: production of more individuals than the environment can support. Leads to a struggle for existence among individuals of a population, with only a fraction of their offspring surviving. This is the inference darwin arrived at after reading malthus.
