Chapter 25 Notes: Evolution by Natural Selection

Typological thinking: idea that species are unchanging types and

that variations within species are unimportant or even
misleading (Plato)
Aristotle: great chain of being, scale of nature in that species
were organized into a sequence based on increased size and
complexity with humans on top; characteristics of species were
fixed and did not change through time
Lamarck: evolution: species are not static but change through
time; followed chain idea so that simple organisms originate at
the base of the chain and move up through time; evolution is
progressive that always producing larger and more complex and
better species
Darwin: variation among individuals in a population population
thinking
o Descent with modification: species that lived in the past
are the ancestors of the species existing today and that
species change through time
o Studied fossil: any trace of an organism that lived in the
past
o Fossil record: all the fossils that have been found on Earth
and described in thes ceientific literature
o Extant species: species living today
o Geological time scale: sequence of named intervals or
eons, eras, or periods that represent major events in
Earths history
o Transitional feature: trait in a fossil species that is
intermediate between those of ancestral (older) and
derived younger species
Evidence of Descent from a Common Ancestor: same species are
found in the same geographic area: Galapagos mockingbirds
collected in different islands were distinct species yet very
similar: similar but distinct
o Descended from a common ancestor, colonized on
different islands and had changed through time and formed
new species
Evidence of Descent from a Common Ancestor: similar species
share homologies
o Genetic Homology
o Developmental Homology
o Structural Homology (morphology)
o The three levels of homology interact with one another
Evolutions Internal Consistency
o Biologist draw from several sources of information

o Most powerful evidence for any scientific theory including

evolution by natural selection is internal consistency:
observation that data from independent sources agree in
supporting predictions
Darwins Inspiration
o Noticed that with artificial selection could choose certain
individuals with desirable traits to reproduce and it led him
to the idea for struggle of existence
Recent Research on Natural Selection
o How did Bacteria become Resistant to Antibiotics? Bacteria
that causes TB has grown a resistance to drugs used to
treat TB
rpoB gene codes for a component of RNA polymerase
that is essential in the survival and reproduction of
bacterial cells
Point mutation caused a change in the amino acid
sequence of the RNA polymerase and changed its
shape
Antibiotic works by binding and is dependent on its
shape
Natural Selection: few cells had the mutation to
begin with before drug therapy and stayed at low
frequency because not as effective as original; when
drug therapy began, original ones died off but
abnormal ones increased after therapy ended and
then began to dominant because favorable
Natural selection acts on individuals but only populations evolve:
allele frequencies change in populations not in individuals
Chapter 26: Evolutionary Processes