Biology – The natural science that studies life. Areas of focus include structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy.
In biology, evolution is the change in heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Genetic variation tends to exist within any given population as a result of genetic mutation and recombination. Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on this variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation.
Zoology is the scientific study of animals. Its studies include the structure, embryology, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct, and how they interact with their ecosystems. Zoology is one of the primary branches of biology. The term is derived from Ancient Greek ζῷον, zōion ('animal'), and λόγος, logos.
Evolutionary developmental biology is a field of biological research that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to infer how developmental processes evolved.
Molecular evolution is the process of change in the sequence composition of cellular molecules such as DNA, RNA, and proteins across generations. The field of molecular evolution uses principles of evolutionary biology and population genetics to explain patterns in these changes. Major topics in molecular evolution concern the rates and impacts of single nucleotide changes, neutral evolution vs. natural selection, origins of new genes, the genetic nature of complex traits, the genetic basis of speciation, the evolution of development, and ways that evolutionary forces influence genomic and phenotypic changes.
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth. Evolution holds that all species are related and gradually change over generations. In a population, the genetic variations affect the phenotypes of an organism. These changes in the phenotypes will be an advantage to some organisms, which will then be passed onto their offspring. Some examples of evolution in species over many generations are the peppered moth and flightless birds. In the 1930s, the discipline of evolutionary biology emerged through what Julian Huxley called the modern synthesis of understanding, from previously unrelated fields of biological research, such as genetics and ecology, systematics, and paleontology.
Niche construction is the process by which an organism alters its own local environment. These alterations can be a physical change to the organism’s environment or encompass when an organism actively moves from one habitat to another to experience a different environment. Examples of niche construction include the building of nests and burrows by animals, and the creation of shade, influencing of wind speed, and alternation of nutrient cycling by plants. Although these alterations are often beneficial to the constructor, they are not always.
Conrad Hal Waddington was a British developmental biologist, paleontologist, geneticist, embryologist and philosopher who laid the foundations for systems biology, epigenetics, and evolutionary developmental biology.
In evolutionary developmental biology, heterochrony is any genetically controlled difference in the timing, rate, or duration of a developmental process in an organism compared to its ancestors or other organisms. This leads to changes in the size, shape, characteristics and even presence of certain organs and features. It is contrasted with heterotopy, a change in spatial positioning of some process in the embryo, which can also create morphological innovation. Heterochrony can be divided into intraspecific heterochrony, variation within a species, and interspecific heterochrony, phylogenetic variation, i.e. variation of a descendant species with respect to an ancestral species.
Deborah Charlesworth is a population geneticist from the UK, notable for her important discoveries in population genetics and evolutionary biology. Her most notable research is in understanding the evolution of recombination, sex chromosomes and mating system for plants.
The Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) is an international center for advanced studies in the life and sustainability sciences. It is a "Home to Theory that Matters" that supports the articulation, analysis, and integration of theories in biology and the sustainability sciences, exploring their wider scientific, cultural, and social significance. The institute is located in Klosterneuburg, near Vienna, Austria. Until 2013, the institute was located in the family mansion of the Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz in Altenberg. Lorenz' work laid the foundation for an evolutionary approach to mind and cognition.
Gerd B. Müller is an Austrian biologist who is emeritus professor at the University of Vienna where he was the head of the Department of Theoretical Biology in the Center for Organismal Systems Biology. His research interests focus on vertebrate limb development, evolutionary novelties, evo-devo theory, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. He is also concerned with the development of 3D based imaging tools in developmental biology.
Günter P. Wagner is an Austrian-born evolutionary biologist who is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary biology at Yale University, and head of the Wagner Lab.
Ulla Hansen is a professor emerita of biology at Boston University. Her research group focuses on the study of transcription factor LSF.
A compositional domain in genetics is a region of DNA with a distinct guanine (G) and cytosine (C) G-C and C-G content. The homogeneity of compositional domains is compared to that of the chromosome on which they reside. As such, compositional domains can be homogeneous or nonhomogeneous domains. Compositionally homogeneous domains that are sufficiently long are termed isochores or isochoric domains.
The term phylogenetic niche conservatism has seen increasing use in recent years in the scientific literature, though the exact definition has been a matter of some contention. Fundamentally, phylogenetic niche conservatism refers to the tendency of species to retain their ancestral traits. When defined as such, phylogenetic niche conservatism is therefore nearly synonymous with phylogenetic signal. The point of contention is whether or not "conservatism" refers simply to the tendency of species to resemble their ancestors, or implies that "closely related species are more similar than expected based on phylogenetic relationships". If the latter interpretation is employed, then phylogenetic niche conservatism can be seen as an extreme case of phylogenetic signal, and implies that the processes which prevent divergence are in operation in the lineage under consideration. Despite efforts by Jonathan Losos to end this habit, however, the former interpretation appears to frequently motivate scientific research. In this case, phylogenetic niche conservatism might best be considered a form of phylogenetic signal reserved for traits with broad-scale ecological ramifications. Thus, phylogenetic niche conservatism is usually invoked with regards to closely related species occurring in similar environments.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to evolution:
The extended evolutionary synthesis consists of a set of theoretical concepts argued to be more comprehensive than the earlier modern synthesis of evolutionary biology that took place between 1918 and 1942. The extended evolutionary synthesis was called for in the 1950s by C. H. Waddington, argued for on the basis of punctuated equilibrium by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the 1980s, and was reconceptualized in 2007 by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller. Notably, Dr. Müller concluded from this research that Natural Selection has no way of explaining speciation, saying: “selection has no innovative capacity...the generative and the ordering aspects of morphological evolution are thus absent from evolutionary theory.”
Kevin Neville Lala is an English evolutionary biologist who is Professor of Behavioural and Evolutionary Biology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Educated at the University of Southampton and University College London, he was a Human Frontier Science Program fellow at the University of California, Berkeley before joining the University of St Andrews in 2002. He is one of the co-founders of niche construction theory and a prominent advocate of the extended evolutionary synthesis. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Society of Biology. He has also received a European Research Council Advanced Grant, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and a John Templeton Foundation grant. He was the president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association from 2007 to 2010 and a former president of the Cultural Evolution Society. Lala is currently an external faculty of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.
The G-value paradox arises from the lack of correlation between the number of protein-coding genes among eukaryotes and their relative biological complexity. The microscopic nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, for example, is composed of only a thousand cells but has about the same number of genes as a human. Researchers suggest resolution of the paradox may lie in mechanisms such as alternative splicing and complex gene regulation that make the genes of humans and other complex eukaryotes relatively more productive.
