Adaptation is one of the basic phenomena of biology. Through the process of adaptation, an organism becomes better suited to its habitat.
Adaptation is one of the two main processes that explain the diverse species we see in biology. The other is speciation (species-splitting or cladogenesis). A favourite example used today to study the interplay of adaptation and speciation is the evolution of cichlid fish in African rivers and lakes.
When people speak about adaptation they often mean something which helps an animal or plant survive. One of the most widespread adaptations in animals is the evolution of the eye. Another example is the adaptation of horses' teeth to grinding grass. Camouflage is another adaptation; so is mimicry. The better adapted animals are the most likely to survive, and to reproduce successfully (natural selection).
An internal parasite (such as a fluke) is a good example: it has a very simple bodily structure, but still the organism is highly adapted to its particular environment. From this we see that adaptation is not just a matter of visible traits: in such parasites critical adaptations take place in the life cycle, which is often quite complex.
Not all features of an organism are adaptations. Adaptations tend to reflect the past life of a species. If a species has recently changed its life style, a once valuable adaptation may become useless, and eventually become a dwindling vestige.
Adaptations are never perfect. There are always tradeoffs between the various functions and structures in a body. It is the organism as a whole which lives and reproduces, therefore it is the complete set of adaptations which gets passed on to future generations.
In populations, there are forces which add variation to the population (such as mutation), and forces which remove it. Genetic drift is the name given to random changes which remove variation from a population. Genetic drift gets rid of variation at the rate of 1/(2N) where N = population size. It is therefore "a very weak evolutionary force in large populations".
Genetic drift explains how random chance can affect evolution in surprisingly big ways, but only when populations are quite small. Overall, its action is to make the individuals more similar to each other, and hence more vulnerable to disease or to chance events in their environment.
How species form is a major part of evolutionary biology. Darwin interpreted 'evolution' (a word he did not use at first) as being about speciation. That is why he called his famous book "On the Origin of Species".
Darwin thought most species arose directly from pre-existing species. This is called "anagenesis": new species by older species changing. Now we think most species arise by previous species splitting: "cladogenesis".
Two groups that start the same can also become very different if they live in different places. When a species gets split into two geographical regions, a process starts. Each adapts to its own situation. After a while, individuals from one group can no longer reproduce with the other group. Two good species have evolved from one.
A German explorer, Moritz Wagner, during his three years in Algeria in the 1830s, studied flightless beetles. Each species is confined to a stretch of the north coast between rivers which descend from the Atlas mountains to the Mediterranean. As soon as one crosses a river, a different but closely related species appears. He wrote later:
This was an early account of the importance of geographical separation. Another biologist who thought geographical separation was critical was Ernst Mayr.
One example of natural speciation is the three-spined stickleback, a sea fish that, after the last ice age, invaded freshwater, and set up colonies in isolated lakes and streams. Over about 10,000 generations, the sticklebacks show great differences, including variations in fins, changes in the number or size of their bony plates, variable jaw structure, and color differences.
The wombats of Australia fall into two main groups, common wombats and hairy-nosed wombats. The two types look very similar, apart from the hairiness of their noses. However, they are adapted to different environments. Common wombats live in forested areas and eat mostly green food with lots of moisture. They often feed in the daytime. Hairy-nosed wombats live on hot dry plains where they eat dry grass with very little water or nutrition in it. Their metabolic rate is slow and they sleep most of the day underground.
When two groups that started the same become different enough, then they become two different species. Part of the theory of evolution is that all living things started the same, but then split into different groups over billions of years.
This was an important movement in evolutionary biology, which started in the 1930s and finished in the 1950s. It has been updated regularly ever since.
The synthesis explains how the ideas of Charles Darwin fit with the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, who found out how we inherit our genes. The modern synthesis brought Darwin's idea up to date. It bridged the gap between different types of biologists: geneticists, naturalists, and palaeontologists.
When the theory of evolution was developed, it was not clear that natural selection and genetics worked together. But Ronald Fisher showed that natural selection would work to change species. Sewall Wright explained genetic drift in 1931.
Co-evolution is where the existence of one species is tightly bound up with the life of one or more other species.
New or 'improved' adaptations which occur in one species are often followed by the appearance and spread of related features in the other species. The life and death of living things is intimately connected, not just with the physical environment, but with the life of other species.
These relationships may continue for millions of years, as it has in the pollination of flowering plants by insects. The gut contents, wing structures, and mouthparts of fossilized beetles and flies suggest that they acted as early pollinators. The association between beetles and angiosperms during the Lower Cretaceous period led to parallel radiations of angiosperms and insects into the late Cretaceous. The evolution of nectaries in Upper Cretaceous flowers signals the beginning of the mutualism between hymenoptera and angiosperms.
Charles Darwin was the first to use this metaphor in biology. The "evolutionary tree" shows the relationships among various biological groups. It includes data from DNA, RNA and protein analysis. Tree of life work is a product of traditional comparative anatomy, and modern molecular evolution and molecular clock research.
The major figure in this work is Carl Woese, who defined the Archaea, the third domain (or kingdom) of life. Below is a simplified version of present-day understanding.
Macroevolution: the study of changes above the species level, and how they take place. The basic data for such a study are fossils (palaeontology) and the reconstruction of ancient environments. Some subjects whose study falls within the realm of macroevolution:
It is a term of convenience: for most biologists it does not suggest any change in the process of evolution. For some palaeontologists, what they see in the fossil record cannot be explained just by the gradualist evolutionary synthesis. They are in the minority.
Altruism – the willingness of some to sacrifice themselves for others – is widespread in social animals. As explained above, the next generation can only come from those who survive and reproduce. Some biologists have thought that this meant altruism could not evolve by the normal process of selection. Instead a process called "group selection" was proposed. Group selection refers to the idea that alleles can become fixed or spread in a population because of the benefits they bestow on groups, regardless of the alleles' effect on the fitness of individuals within that group.