Evolution

Reporter: Edlester Esco

What is evolution?

 Evolution is change in the heritable

characteristics of
biological population over
successive generation. These
characteristics are the expressions
of genes that are passed on from
parent to offspring
during reproduction.
Example of Evolution
Charles Darwin and Jean
Baptiste Lamarck Theory
of Evolution
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution
 Charles Darwin was a British naturalist who proposed the theory of
biological evolution by natural selection. He defined evolution as
"descent with modification," the idea that species change over time,
give rise to new species, and share a common ancestor. The mechanism
that Darwin proposed for evolution is natural selection. Because
resources are limited in nature, organisms with heritable traits that
favor survival and reproduction will tend to leave more offspring than
their peers, causing the traits to increase in frequency over generations.
Natural selection causes populations to become adapted, or increasingly
well-suited, to their environments over time. Natural selection depends
on the environment and requires existing heritable variation in a group.
Lamarck’s Theory of evolution (Use and
Disuse)
 Lamarck was struck by the similarities of many of the
animals he studied, and was impressed too by the
burgeoning fossil record. It led him to argue that life was
not fixed. When environments changed, organisms had to
change their behavior to survive. If they began to use an
organ more than they had in the past, it would increase in
its lifetime. If a giraffe stretched its neck for leaves, for
example, a "nervous fluid" would flow into its neck and
make it longer. Its offspring would inherit the longer neck,
and continued stretching would make it longer still over
several generations. Meanwhile organs that organisms
stopped using would shrink.