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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.
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Richard Charles Lewontin was an American evolutionary biologist, mathematician, geneticist, and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he applied techniques from molecular biology, such as gel electrophoresis, to questions of genetic variation and evolution.
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In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the population during that process. Thirdly, it is a phenotypic trait or adaptive trait, with a functional role in each individual organism, that is maintained and has evolved through natural selection.
Robert William Holley was an American biochemist. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1968 for describing the structure of alanine transfer RNA, linking DNA and protein synthesis.
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Ziheng Yang FRS is a Chinese biologist. He holds the R.A. Fisher Chair of Statistical Genetics at University College London, and is the Director of R.A. Fisher Centre for Computational Biology at UCL. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006.
Scott Vernon Edwards is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Organismal and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and the Curator of Ornithology at Harvard's associated museum, the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Danielle "Hopi" Elisabeth Hoekstra is an evolutionary biologist working at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and serving as the Dean of its Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her lab uses natural populations of rodents to study the genetic basis of adaptation. She is the C.Y. Chan Professor of Arts and Sciences and the Xiaomeng Tong and Yu Chen Professor of Life Sciences in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. She is also the Curator of Mammals at the Museum of Comparative Zoology and a Harvard College Professor. In 2014, Hoekstra became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. In 2016, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2017, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hoekstra became the Edgerley Family Dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences in August 2023.
Recent human evolution refers to evolutionary adaptation, sexual and natural selection, and genetic drift within Homo sapiens populations, since their separation and dispersal in the Middle Paleolithic about 50,000 years ago. Contrary to popular belief, not only are humans still evolving, their evolution since the dawn of agriculture is faster than ever before. It has been proposed that human culture acts as a selective force in human evolution and has accelerated it; however, this is disputed. With a sufficiently large data set and modern research methods, scientists can study the changes in the frequency of an allele occurring in a tiny subset of the population over a single lifetime, the shortest meaningful time scale in evolution. Comparing a given gene with that of other species enables geneticists to determine whether it is rapidly evolving in humans alone. For example, while human DNA is on average 98% identical to chimp DNA, the so-called Human Accelerated Region 1 (HAR1), involved in the development of the brain, is only 85% similar.
Sarah Anne Tishkoff is an American geneticist and the David and Lyn Silfen Professor in the Department of Genetics and Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. She also serves as a director for the American Society of Human Genetics and is an associate editor at PLOS Genetics, G3, and Genome Research. She is also a member of the scientific advisory board at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
"The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme", also known as the "Spandrels paper", is a paper by evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, originally published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences in 1979. The paper criticizes the adaptationist school of thought that was prevalent in evolutionary biology at the time using two metaphors: that of the spandrels in St Mark's Basilica, a cathedral in Venice, Italy, and that of the fictional character "Pangloss" in Voltaire's novella Candide. The paper was the first to use the architectural term "spandrel" in a biological context; the term "spandrel" has since gained currency in biology to refer to byproducts of adaptation.
Melissa A. Wilson is an evolutionary and computational biologist and assistant professor at Arizona State University who studies the evolution of sex chromosomes.
Elizabeth Beach Keller (1918—1997) was an American biochemist. She is noted for her discoveries on protein formation. These included her development of the cloverleaf model of transfer RNA, which shows how transfer RNA helps in directing the genetic information within the DNA to form proteins. This model was included in Robert W. Holley's set of works that earned him a share of the Nobel Prize.
Moisés Expósito-Alonso is a Spanish scientist and assistant professor of global change biology at the University of California, Berkeley, member of the Innovative Genomics Institute, and inaugural Freeman Hrabowski Scholar from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research includes the study of plants and how climate change affects their evolution.
References
- 1 2 3 Lang, Susan S. (2004-03-23). "Two Cornell University scientists receive Sloan Fellowships". Cornell Chronicle . Retrieved 2018-12-25.
- ↑ "Nielsen, Rasmus, 1970-". Library of Congress Name Authority File. Retrieved 2018-12-25.
- ↑ "Rasmus Nielsen". Department of Integrative Biology. University of California, Berkeley. 21 June 2012. Retrieved 2018-12-25.
- ↑ Rincon, Paul (2014-07-02). "Altitude gene 'from extinct species'". BBC News . Retrieved 2018-12-25.
- ↑ Wade, Nicholas (2010-07-01). "Scientists Cite Fastest Case of Human Evolution". The New York Times . ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2018-12-25.
- ↑ Zimmer, Carl (2015-09-17). "Inuit Study Adds Twist to Omega-3 Fatty Acids' Health Story". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2018-12-25.
