Evolution Final Project Word Document
This is my final project, to maintain formatting I linked the word document here. Let me know if there are any issues opening it.
What exactly is a species? Humans are obsessive with the categorization of the world around us. However, we often encounter that the world is not as easy to catergorize as one would expect. This is no different for how we group organisms as a species and their evolutionary relationships to one another. There are many systems that can be used for this, first being the biological species concept. The biological species concept is defined as a group of organisms that can naturally reproduce between each other and they are isolated from other populations. This provides a boundary based on reproductive isolation and explains how speciation occurs through gene flow interruption. This, however, does not explain asexual organisms, hybridization, or ring species. Next, is the morphological species concept where physical characteristics and phenotypes are take into consideration for defining a species. This concept can account for asexual organisms and can organize populations aside from genet...
There are two forms of reproduction, sexual and asexual. Sexual reproduction requires much more energy invested than asexual reproduction but the variation it offers is significantly more advantageous than asexual. There are some particular concepts that display how advantageous sexual selection really is. First being The Red Queen Hypothesis, explaining that sexual selection only continues to exist because is allows organisms to continually adapt to their environment with other species evolving at the same time. This is in the context of predators, prey, and parasites. Up next is heterozygosity which occurs when there is more than one allele present in an organism. Lastly, Parasitism is an unexpected topic in sexual selection, but it has a different context than one may associate with sexual selection. The organisms reproducing, experienced variation and at some point that variation becomes more advantageous at combatting diseases like parasites. This challenges the thoughts I always ...
This image displays the difference between Genetic Drift and Natural Selection. Genetic Drift is due to random chance where an even takes place to alter the allelic frequencies in a population. Alternatively, Natural Selection has more of a cause and effect behind it. In this instance, the brown rabbits do not blend into their environment as well as white bunnies. They fall victim to predation more frequenty leading to a shift in the bb allele frequency.
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