LESSON 16 – THE PROCESS OF EVOLUTION

OBJECTIVES
At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:
1. Describe the different evidences of evolution;
2. Discuss the origin and extinction of species in light of natural selection and descent
with modification;
3. Describe how the present system of classification of organisms is based on
evolutionary relationships.

SUBJECT MATTER
The theory of evolution is a central theme in biology, though many people still do not accept
the theory which was popularized by Charles Darwin in his book On the Origin of Species
published in 1859. In this lesson we will explore three aspects of evolution: (1) its evidences;
(2) its power to explain the diversity of life today; and (3) evolution being the basis for
classification of all organisms.

Evidences of Evolution
Basically, evolution states that species change over time. New species appear from
preexisting species through descent with modification and natural selection. According to
Darwin, the process of evolution takes thousands to millions of years to occur. Through the
works of scientists over the years, several evidences were used to validate Darwin’s theory
and somehow reconstruct the process of evolution. We are going to explore these evidences.

Fossil Record

Figure 13.1. Fossil record shows how the modern-day horse descended from an ancestral horse.

The fossil record documents the patterns of evolution. It shows how present-day organisms
were different from the organisms in the past and how changes have occurred from ancestral
organisms to the present-day ones. For example, Figure 13.1 shows that the modern horse
Equus evolved from a smaller
horse-like animal Eohippus some
55 million years ago. More fossils
revealed transitional species such
as the Mesohippus and
Merychippus which shows that the
modern-day horse started from a
smaller, 4-toed animal and
eventually got larger with reduced
number of toes.
Figure 13.2. The bones of the human arm, cat forelimb, whale
Homologous Structures flipper, and bat wing are strikingly similar in arrangement.
Have you ever seen a cat forelimb,
a bat wing, and a whale flipper? Compared to the human arm, you might think that the
structures mentioned appear quite different from each other and are of different functions:
human arm is for grabbing; cat forelimb is for walking; bat wing is for flying; and whale
flipper is for swimming. Surprisingly, if we look at the bones of these structures, you will find
that the way the bones are arranged are strikingly similar (Figure 13.2). Structures like these
are homologous structures. Homologous structures are those structures believed to have a
common ancestry due to similarity in structure. Therefore, the four animals must have all
descended from a common ancestor.

However, there are also structures with striking resemblance and function but are from
different ancestry called analogous structures. For example, the wing of an insect and the
wings of a bat are analogous structures. Insect wings are thought to have originated from an
ancestral gill. Analogous structures appear if natural selection brings two different groups of
organisms to evolve a common adaptation due to the same environmental challenges they
face.

Vestigial Structures
There are some structures
found in living things with
no apparent function. these
are known as vestigial
structures. It is said that
these structures are
Figure 13.3. Whales have a vestigial pelvic bone, suggesting that they
homologous to structures descended from tetrapod mammals.
useful in other species,
especially ancestral ones.
For example, humans have
a vestigial tailbone, which
Figure 13.3. Whales have a vestigial pelvic bone, suggesting that they
is homologous to a descended from tetrapod mammals.
functional tailbone of
ancestral apes; whales have a vestigial pelvic bone (Figure 13.3), which is homologous to a
functional pelvic bone of ancestral tetrapod mammal.
Similarity of Embryos

Embryos are unborn or unhatched

animals in its earliest phases of
development. Look at Figure 13.4,
what do you notice about the embryos?
They look very similar to one another.
All of them have tails and gill slits. This
suggests that these animals, which are
all from different groups of
vertebrates, had a common ancestor.

Biochemical Evidence
Cytochrome c is a protein found in the Figure 13.4. Embryos of fish, salamander, tortoise, chick,
membranes of the mitochondria. As rabbit, and human are very similar.
you already know, mitochondria are
found in almost all eukaryotes. Surprisingly, even distant groups of organisms show similar
amino acid sequence of cytochrome c, which led scientists to believe that eukaryotes all had
a common ancestor. Scientists use the amino acid sequence of cytochrome c to determine the
number of differences in the sequence between two organisms; then they use this data to
infer how distant the two organisms are in terms of evolutionary relationship. For example,
humans and dogs differ by 13 amino acids while humans and snakes differ by 20. Humans
are thus closer to dogs than they are to snakes. Chimpanzee and humans have identical
cytochrome c, indicating a very close evolutionary relationship between chimpanzees and
humans.

Origin and Extinction of Species

Now that we have learned about the evidences of evolution, let us now study how evolution
exactly works. Evolution has been identified as the driving force towards the diversity of life
we witness today.

Evolution basically works because of two observations: (1) there are variations in heritable
traits within a population; and (2) organisms produce more offspring than the environment
can support. From these two principles, Darwin inferred that due to limited resources and
environmental challenges, only those organisms who “fit” with the environment can survive
and populate.

We will simulate how new species emerge by using colored circles. In the biological species
concept, species is defined as a group of populations having the capacity to interbreed and
bear fertile offspring. In simple terms, if two individuals cannot bear a fertile offspring, then
they are of different species. We take the larger circle as the environment and the smaller
circles as the species in a small population (Figure 13.5):
 A. Suppose we have a population of a certain species thriving in a given locality.
B. Then, some of the individuals migrated to new different environments and
reproduced. Take note that as they reproduced, new traits emerged.
C. One day, a predator appeared and hunted for these individuals. The predator eats any
individual it can easily see.
D. Only those who blended with the environment survived. In the end, we have different
localities having differentiated individuals. In the long run, as new environmental
challenges arise, more traits might appear, until the individuals are so distinct that
they can no longer interbreed and hence can be classified as different species.

(A) (B)

(C) (D)

Figure 13.5. Simplified simulation of evolution.

However, life does not only produce new species. It also erases some species from the planet.
That is why we no longer see the species on the fossil record. Scientists have come up with
ideas about how extinction occurs. One cause is attributed to changes in global climate and
atmosphere, such that the environment is no longer capable of supporting a wide variety of
organisms that once thrived there because their adaptations all of a sudden were no longer
fit for survival. Today, human activities such as overhunting and pollution are the major
causes of extinction of some species.

Classification of Organisms
As early as during the time of Aristotle, the Father of Biology, humans have classified
different living things. That is the reason we have terms such as “plants” and “animals” and
so on. Aristotle also believed that organisms can be classified based on a “natural scale”.

Today, since biologists are convinced with the idea of Darwin that all living things share a
common ancestor, classification of all living things on Earth are now based on evolutionary
relationships. That is, organisms are classified according to the degree of similarity of their
physical, chemical, and behavioral characteristics; or, simply, according to shared ancestry.
Shared ancestry between groups of organisms can be illustrated using a cladogram.

Figure 13.6. A cladogram of vertebrates. Shown in red lines are the shared
characteristics of the groups (e.g. primates, rodents and rabbits all have hair).

Figure 13.6 is an example of a cladogram, which appears like a branching tree. Using the
cladogram, we can say that sharks and ray-finned fishes are related because their common
ancestor had vertebrae. However, ray-finned fishes and amphibians are more closely related
because their common ancestor had both vertebrae and a bony skeleton.

Aside from cladograms, organisms are classified according to a standard developed by the
Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, more popularly known as Carolus Linnaeus. He introduced
the system of using a standard two-word Latin name to every organism, known as the
scientific name. Scientists generally classify organisms into seven categories in increasing
degree of shared characteristics:
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species
Organisms of the same order have more shared characteristics than organisms of the same
class; organisms within the same family have more shared characteristics than organisms of
the same order, and so on. For example, cats and dogs belong to the same order: Order
Carnivora (mammals who are carnivores). Cats and humans belong to the same class: Class
Mammalia (animals who produce milk), but not to the same order (humans are of the Order
Primata). Therefore, cats are more closely related to dogs than they are to humans.