The Ecology Book

1859 Darwin elaborates on his theories of evolution in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which is an insta ...

20 B efore the 18th century, most people believed that plant and animal species stayed unchanged throughout time—a view now know ...

21 Fossil finds changed ideas about how life began. The first example of an articulated plesiosaur—Plesiosaurus dolichodeirus—wa ...

22 I n the early days of studying fossils, many people denied they could be extinct species. They failed to see why God would cr ...

23 U niformitarianism is the theory that geological processes, such as the laying down of sediment, erosion, and volcanic activi ...

THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION US_024-031_Evolution_by_Natural_Selection.indd 24 12/11/18 6:24 PM ...

US_024-031_Evolution_by_Natural_Selection.indd 25 12/11/18 6:24 PM ...

26 N atural selection, a concept developed by British naturalist Charles Darwin and set out in his book On the Origin of Species ...

27 of 1835 provided especially strong evidence for his later theory of evolution by natural selection. Here, he observed that th ...

28 EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION helped an individual organism live longer and reproduce more successfully would be passed on t ...

29 helpful. If individual A lives 10 times as long as individual B, but the latter produces twice as many offspring that then al ...

30 EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION Dobzhansky put forward the idea that regularly occurring genetic mutations are sufficient to p ...

THE STORY OF EVOLUTION 31 occurred. For example, a fossil record stretches back 60 million years for ancestors of the horse. The ...

32 L ong before scientists cracked the genetic code, in 1866 an Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel was the first to show how trai ...

33 Pea plants provided the raw data that Mendel used to develop his theories explaining the transmission of traits from one gene ...

34 WE’VE DISCOVERED THE SECRET OF LIFE THE ROLE OF DNA T he discovery of the structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in 1953 is ...

35 See also: Early theories of evolution 20–21 ■ Evolution by natural selection 24–31 ■ The rules of heredity 32–33 ■ The selfis ...

36 THE ROLE OF DNA the ladder down the middle to produce two single strands. These act as templates for the production of a seco ...

37 Mutated blood cells occur in sickle-cell disease—a genetic disorder passed on when both parents carry the faulty gene. It can ...

38 IN CONTEXT KEY FIGURE Richard Dawkins (1941–) BEFORE 1963 British biologist William Donald Hamilton writes about the “selfish ...