PSYCH 1XX3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Daphne Major, Assistive Technology, Genetic Drift
Document Summary
Adaptation: biological traits that help an individual to survive and reproduce in its habitat. Adaptation emerge in development as a result of relevant genes in interaction with the environment. One of the four basic mechanisms of evolution (other 3 listed below: genetic drift, mutation, migration. The process of natural selection can be descried as the differential survival and reproduction of organisms due to the heritable difference between them. For natural selection there must be three components: heritability, variation, reproductive success. Stabilizing selection: selection against any sort of departure from the species- typical adaptive design. A classic example of rapid evolutionary change comes from the work on studying the evolution of beak size in a species called the medium ground- Finch which lives on daphne island in the galapagos. In 1977 a severe drought hit the island and decimated the vegetation, food was scarce and all the small seeds were quickly eaten up leaving only the large ones.
