Charles Darwin

With hard work and dedication that almost was forgotten, Gregor Mendel was named the “Father of Genetics” after he spent eight years studying pea plants and discovering the procedure of traits passed down from one generation to the next. For more than 40 years, people didn’t really pay close attention or any attention at all to Mendel's work. It wasn’t until the 20th century, Mendel's work was finally noticed which introduced new laws to understanding heredity. Gregor Mendel was born on July…

"Knowledge within a discipline develops according to the principles of natural selection." How useful is this metaphor? Many times questioning existing knowledge leads to new evidence that either supports the knowledge or proves to be wrong. Thus knowledge that is preserved is based on natural selection. However how does natural selection determine the value of knowledge? In History, natural selection determines the value of knowledge through the use of memory and belief. Whereas in natural…

Microevolution allows us to see a small scale of evolution over a short period of time. To visually see and test evolution we need organisms that adapt quickly and have short life spans. Fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, are model organisms in order to gather as much information within a short period of time. Fruit flies have a life span of about 2 weeks, and are low maintenance, making it easy to see several generations. (Varga, S. J., Qi, C., Podolsky, E., & Lee, D , 2014) According to…

With the emergence of Darwinism’s book, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, several individuals speculated that evolution was the ultimate antagonist toward the fundamental belief of the origin of creation: God. However, Kenneth Miller, a cellular biologist, rejects the separation of the two concepts in his book, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, by arguing that accepting one belief does not imply refuting the other but…

Evolution does not occur by itself. It uses thousands of organisms that twist together to form all the life on this planet we call home. In our world, nothing exists in isolation yet everything is weaved together to form a complex system of evolutionary changes. In isolation, parasites could not survive and reproduce, plants could not spread their seeds, viruses could not infect their host, and organisms could not form adaptations from their environment that allow them to slowly evolve into…

Race in Human Variation The Concept of Race In the eighteenth century, the concept of race depended on several ideas about the environmental influences, culture and human nature. Some researchers believed that the concept of race does not illustrate human diversity. They argue that the focus was more on culture as influenced by environment. Social scientists perceived race as a way of classifying people on the basis of many kinds of differences such as gender, cultural behavior, origin and…

Evolution of America Some people believe that the American Independence was more of a revolution than an evolution I’m here to tell you why it’s actually an evolution. The reason it is an evolution is because there are multiple events that lead up to American Independence. In a revolution we have a big turning point that makes it into a revolution, which is not what happened. Our three main topics that prove that American Independence is an evolution are Common Sense, The Magna Carta, and…

Process and analyse information from secondary sources to explain a modern example of ‘natural’ selection. (Structural, Physiological, Behaviour) Some organisms, such as bacteria and insects, produce large numbers of offspring. Amongst large numbers of bacteria offspring, some individuals may carry genes that give them resistance to antibiotics. These individuals are then able to survive and reproduce with reduced competition from other members of the same species. Each generation will produce a…

In the 1999 passage, “Retelling Experiments: H.B.D. Kettlewell’s Studies of Industrial Melanism in Peppered Moths” author, Joel B. Hagen recounts the story of one of the most famous breakthroughs in biological science. In the mid 1950s, the work of H.B.D. Kettlewell solved persisting loopholes in Darwin’s theory of natural selection by conducting several experiments using peppered moths. Kettlewell’s research is widely discussed in biology classes today, yet there is often deviation in how the…

1. Darwin’s theory of natural selection directly applies to the domestication of plants and animals in numerous ways. The first being that natural selection, or the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype is based on the idea that organisms pass genetic mutations onto their offspring that can potentially increase the success of reproduction and survival for future generations. Over time these continual genetic mutations can result in a new species…