BIOL 290 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Rudolf Virchow, Carl Linnaeus, Microevolution
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Evolution
Thursday, September 13, 2018
5:18 PM
Why?
• Understand the diversity
• Enhance food production
• Explain bizarre, and fascinating adaptations
• Understand our origins
• Emerging agricultural pests
• Emerging infectious diseases
• Manage evolution of drug resistance
• Maintaining biodiversity and nature's services to humans
• What is evolution
• Evolution is descent with modification; evolution is a change in the genetic composition of a
population across generations
1. Individuals in a population vary in a trait
2. Trait is heritable
3. Individuals vary in reproductive success
4. Alleles with less success are lost, and those with higher success are fixed over time
5. The distribution of genotypes in this population has changed; evolution has occurred
• Microevolution: change in the distribution of genotypes in a population from one generation to
the next
• Macroevolution: formation of new species and other taxa over millions of years
• Mechanisms of evolution:
• Natural Selection
• Genetic Drift
• Mutation
• 1735: Carl Linnaeus: held that species were fixed, although related according to divine plan;
wanted to name everything
• 1750s: Georges De Buffon: suggested that some similar species such as horses and zebras, or lions
tigers and leopards might be varieties descended from a common ancestor
• Noted that despite similar environments different regions have distinct plant and animal species:
Buffon's law
• Early 1800s: Jean Baptiste de Lamarck: spontaneous generation; two forces comprising evolution:
Theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics
1. A force driving animals from simple to complex forms and
2. A force adapting individuals to their local environments and differentiating them from eachother
• 1850s
• Rudolf Virchow: All cells come from cells
• Louis Pasteur: Organisms come from other organisms
• Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace: Species come from other species via natural selection
o Cowrote a note on evolution