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Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. The process of evolution has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation.
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 on to 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.
Bryan Campbell Clarke was a British Professor of genetics, latterly emeritus at the University of Nottingham. Clarke is particularly noted for his work on apostatic selection and other forms of frequency-dependent selection, and work on polymorphism in snails, much of it done during the 1960s. Later, he studied molecular evolution. He made the case for natural selection as an important factor in the maintenance of molecular variation, and in driving evolutionary changes in molecules through time. In doing so, he questioned the over-riding importance of random genetic drift advocated by King, Jukes, and Kimura. With Professor James J Murray Jnr, he carried out an extensive series of studies on speciation in land snails of the genus Partula inhabiting the volcanic islands of the Eastern Pacific. These studies helped illuminate the genetic changes that take place during the origin of species.
George Ledyard Stebbins Jr. was an American botanist and geneticist who is widely regarded as one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. Stebbins received his Ph.D. in botany from Harvard University in 1931. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where his work with E. B. Babcock on the genetic evolution of plant species, and his association with a group of evolutionary biologists known as the Bay Area Biosystematists, led him to develop a comprehensive synthesis of plant evolution incorporating genetics.
Brian Charlesworth is a British evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, and editor of Biology Letters. Since 1997, he has been Royal Society Research Professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IEB) in Edinburgh. He has been married since 1967 to the British evolutionary biologist Deborah Charlesworth.
The European fire-bellied toad is a species of fire-bellied toad native to eastern parts of mainland Europe, where it can be found near waterbodies such as ponds and marshes. It is known for its red colored belly used to ward off predators, an example of aposematism, and its distinctive "whoop" call.
In parapatric speciation, two subpopulations of a species evolve reproductive isolation from one another while continuing to exchange genes. This mode of speciation has three distinguishing characteristics: 1) mating occurs non-randomly, 2) gene flow occurs unequally, and 3) populations exist in either continuous or discontinuous geographic ranges. This distribution pattern may be the result of unequal dispersal, incomplete geographical barriers, or divergent expressions of behavior, among other things. Parapatric speciation predicts that hybrid zones will often exist at the junction between the two populations.
Derek Ernest Gilmor Briggs is an Irish palaeontologist and taphonomist based at Yale University. Briggs is one of three palaeontologists, along with Harry Blackmore Whittington and Simon Conway Morris, who were key in the reinterpretation of the fossils of the Burgess Shale. He is the Yale University G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics, Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, and former Director of the Peabody Museum.
Joseph "Joe" Felsenstein is a Professor Emeritus in the Departments of Genome Sciences and Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is best known for his work on phylogenetic inference, and is the author of Inferring Phylogenies, and principal author and distributor of the package of phylogenetic inference programs called PHYLIP. Closely related to his work on phylogenetic inference is his introduction of methods for making statistically independent comparisons using phylogenies.
A hybrid zone exists where the ranges of two interbreeding species or diverged intraspecific lineages meet and cross-fertilize. Hybrid zones can form in situ due to the evolution of a new lineage but generally they result from secondary contact of the parental forms after a period of geographic isolation, which allowed their differentiation. Hybrid zones are useful in studying the genetics of speciation as they can provide natural examples of differentiation and gene flow between populations that are at some point on the continuum between diverging populations and separate species with reproductive isolation.
H. Allen Orr is the Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester.
James Mallet is an evolutionary zoologist specialising in entomology.
Jonathan Andrew Eisen is an American evolutionary biologist, currently working at University of California, Davis. His academic research is in the fields of evolutionary biology, genomics and microbiology and he is the academic editor-in-chief of the open access journal PLOS Biology.
Godfrey Matthew Hewitt was a British professor and evolutionary geneticist at the University of East Anglia who was very influential in the development of the fields of molecular ecology, phylogeography, speciation and hybridisation.
Peter D. Keightley is a British geneticist who is Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.
The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) 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.
The scientific study of speciation — how species evolve to become new species — began around the time of Charles Darwin in the middle of the 19th century. Many naturalists at the time recognized the relationship between biogeography and the evolution of species. The 20th century saw the growth of the field of speciation, with major contributors such as Ernst Mayr researching and documenting species' geographic patterns and relationships. The field grew in prominence with the modern evolutionary synthesis in the early part of that century. Since then, research on speciation has expanded immensely.
Michael Gordon Ritchie is a British evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of St Andrews. He is known for his work on speciation. He served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology from 2011 to 2017, and Vice-President of the Society for the Study of Evolution from 2004 to 2005.
Mark A. Kirkpatrick is a theoretical population geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He currently holds the T. S. Painter Centennial Professorship in Genetics in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. His research touches on a wide variety of topics, including the evolution of sex chromosomes, sexual selection, and speciation. Kirkpatrick is the co-author, along with Douglas J. Futuyma, of a popular undergraduate evolution textbook. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.
Roger Kenneth Butlin is a British evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Sheffield. He is known for his work on speciation. He served as Editor of Heredity from 2009 to 2012, and President of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology from 2013 to 2015. In 2015 he received the Darwin Wallace Medal.
References
- 1 2 Nicholas H. Barton, Derek E. G. Briggs, Jonathan A. Eisen, David B. Goldstein, Nipam H. Patel "Evolution" Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; 1st edition (30 June 2007) ISBN 0-87969-684-2
- 1 2 "Curriculum Vitae – Nicholas Hamilton Barton" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 December 2016. Retrieved 8 October 2016.
- ↑ Barton, N. H.; Etheridge, A. M. (2004). "The effect of selection on genealogies". Genetics. 166 (2): 1115–31. doi:10.1534/genetics.166.2.1115. PMC 1470728 . PMID 15020491.
- ↑ Prof. Barton's staff homepage at the University of Edinburgh
- ↑ List of publications
- ↑ Nick Barton's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
- ↑ Barton, N. H.; Hewitt, G. M. (1989). "Adaptation, speciation and hybrid zones". Nature. 341 (6242): 497–503. Bibcode:1989Natur.341..497B. doi:10.1038/341497a0. PMID 2677747. S2CID 4360057.
- ↑ Barton, N. H. (2001). "The role of hybridization in evolution". Molecular Ecology. 10 (3): 551–68. doi:10.1046/j.1365-294x.2001.01216.x. PMID 11298968. S2CID 22129817.
- ↑ "National Academy of Sciences Elects Members and International Members". www.nasonline.org. 30 April 2024. Retrieved 12 May 2024.
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