BIO 106 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: The Yes Album, Ontogeny, Gregor Mendel
Document Summary
Two major goals: phylogeny, locate origins of characteristics, understand processes that cause species diversity. Essential characteristics of science: guided by natural law, testable and falsifiable, conclusions are tentative. Hypothetic-deductive method: hypotheses = potential explanations. Scientific method: observation, question, hypothesis, empirical test, conclusions, publication. Null hypothesis = able to reject predictions if hypothesis is false yes/no answer. Systematics = ordering by evolutionary relationships: origins of darwinian evolutionary theory. Pre-darwinian evolutionary ideas: ancient greeks = long history of evolutionary change, fossils are evidence of former life, biblical account of earth"s history = requires no mechanism. Lamarck: fossils were remains of extinct animals, inheritance of acquired characteristics, transformational as opposed to darwin"s variational, darwin = evolution occurs at population level. Darwin developed theory of struggle for existence/competition: alfred russel wallace shared darwin"s theory of evolution, published w/ him. Long history of ongoing change: common descent. All life came from a common ancestor. Phylogeny = branching evolutionary: multiplication of species.
