Evolution and Systematics

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 Definition
• Evolution means descent with modification, or
change in the form, physiology, and behavior
of organisms over many generations of time.
The evolutionary changes of living things
occur in a diverging, tree-like pattern of
lineages.
• Living things possess adaptations: i.e., they are
well adjusted in form, physiology, and
behavior, for life in their natural environment.
• Many thinkers before Darwin had discussed
the possibility that species change through
time into other species. Lamarck is the best
known. But in the mid-nineteenth century
most biologists believed that species are fixed
in form.
• Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural
selection explains evolutionary change and
adaptation.
• Darwin’s contemporaries mainly accepted his
idea of evolution, but not his explanation of it
by natural selection.
• Darwin lacked a theory of heredity. When
Mendel’s ideas were rediscovered at the turn
of the twentieth century, they were initially
thought to count against the theory of natural
selection.
• Fisher, Haldane, and Wright demonstrated that
Mendelian heredity and natural selection are
compatible; the synthesis of the two ideas is called
neo-Darwinism or the synthetic theory of
evolution.
• During the 1930s and 1940s, neo-Darwinism
gradually spread through all areas of biology and
became widely accepted. It unified genetics,
systematics, paleontology, and classic comparative
morphology and embryology.
 DEFINITIONS
• gene: A sequence of nucleotides coding for a
protein (or, in some cases, part of a protein); a unit
of heredity.
• genetic code: The code relating nucleotide triplets
in the mRNA (or DNA) to amino acids in the
proteins.
• genetic drift: Changes in the frequencies of alleles
in a population that occur by chance, rather than
because of natural selection.
• genome: The full set of DNA in a cell or
organism.
• genomics: The study that characterizes genes
and the traits they encode.
• genotype: The set of two genes possessed by
an individual at a given locus. More generally,
the genetic profile of an individual.
• gene family: A set of related genes occupying
various loci in the DNA, almost certainly
formed by duplication of an ancestral gene
and having a recognizably similar sequence.
Members of a gene family may be functionally
very similar or differ widely. The globin gene
family is an example.