Allison's evolution blog

       Mutation rates are rather variable for different organisms, depending on if the organism is a multi or unicellular organism, and genome size is also very important. So, I think that mutation rates do evolve since they are having changes over time. Mutation rates line up with Darwin's four postulates which in include: 1)  Individuals in a population vary in their traits, 2)  Some of that trait variation is inherited from parents to their offspring, 3)  More offspring are produced in every generation than can possibly survive, 4)  Successful survival and reproduction of those offspring is not random but dependent on the traits they inherited from their parents. Mutation rates evolving can be associated with Darwin's postulates because mutation is the main cause of genetic variation.        I am thinking that high and low mutation rates can be adaptive if there are extreme conditions in the environment. I believe we di...

   Technically speaking, fitness is the quantitative representation of natural selection. There are many variables that have an affect on fitness. Some of these variables include environmental factors such as resources, competition, etc. at the given time.  Fitness cannot properly be measured for an entire population because it is too abstract. If you go out in the wild and try to measure a population, there would be no way to accurately measure and track all of a population. Fitness can be measured by fitness proxies instead. A fitness proxy can be measured by the quantity as well as the quality of offspring.       As an example, if I were to measure the fitness of a zebra in a natural environment, I would tag and track 20 moms and babies that originate from different environments in Africa. I would track the offspring as they grow up and see how many offspring they produce as one way to measure fitness. I would also compare how well they survive and if ...

I would explain evolution as a change over time in a species. There are many ways in which a species can evolve and it does not always mean that they are evolving to be better or worse off than their ancestors. Some species may evolve to be "fitter" than they were before, whether that means they gained or lost a specific trait. Species can also evolve to still have a trait, but the trait may not carry much significance to the species survival. From the class discussion last week, I have come to realize that there are many different aspects that go into what evolution is and the book has explained even different text books have different explanations of what evolution actually is.  I believe that evolution is a fact because there is evidence pointing to evolution in species. There may be some theories built off of the facts because new information is always being discovered, but it is building onto the already proven facts instead of discrediting them. In class, we discussed t...