adaptation

Red Queen

...re sexual is that sex increases the rate at which adaptation can occur. This is for two reasons. First, if an advantageous mutation occurs in an asexual line, it is impossible for that mutation to spread without wiping out all other lines, which may have different advantageous mutations of their own. Sec...

Population genetics

...theory that attempts to explain such phenomena as adaptation and speciation .Population genetics was a vital ingredient in the modern evolutionary synthesis , its primary founders were Sewall Wright , J. B. S. Haldane and Ronald Fisher , who also laid the foundations for the related discipline of quant...

Parthenogenesis

...tion offers a net advantage by allowing more rapid adaptation to changing environments. Asexual lineages can increase their numbers rapidly because (since individuals are always female) everyone can produce viable eggs. In sexual populations half the individuals are male and cannot themselves produce offsprin...

Natural selection

...ditionally, some scientists have theorized that an adaptation which serves to make the organism more adaptable i...lay an important role in cases where selection for adaptation is continuous. For example, the Red Queen hypothesis suggests that sex might have evolved to he...

Genetics

...theory that attempts to explain such phenomena as adaptation and speciation . The related subfield of quantitative genetics, which builds on population genetics, aims to predict the response to selection given data on the phenotype and relationships of individuals. A more recent development of quantita...

Flagellum

...), or a just a highly-derived bacterium with heavy adaptation to extremophily , particularly thermophily (e.g., Cavalier-Smith )). The archaeal flagellum is superficially similar to the bacterial (or eubacterial) flagellum; in the 1980s they were thought to be homologous on the basis of gross morphology an...

Experimental evolution

...e of the large number of generation required for adaptation to occur, evolution experiments are typically carr...d that he had clearly found evidence for Darwinian adaptation in his incubator, and that the organisms had adapted to live in a high-temperature environment. Unfo...

Evolution

...volutionary theory. Most biologists believe that adaptation occurs through the accumulation of many mutations of small effect. However, macromutation is an alternative process for adaption which involves a single, very large scale mutation. Differential survival of traits While mutation can create new ...

Drosophila

...e term "Drosophila" is a modern scientific Latin adaptation from Greek δρόσος, drsos , " dew ", + φίλος, phlos , "loving" + Latin feminine suffix -a . Physique Typically, the small, two-winged flies of the genus Drosophila are an orange-brown ...

DNA

...f genes they contain, which biologists view as an adaptation . As viewed by topologists Topologists like to note that the juxtaposition of the 3' end of one DNA strand beside the 5' end of the other at both ends of a double-helical segment makes the arrangement a " crab canon ". Single-stranded DNA...

Culture

...nd learned, making it a potentially rapid form of adaptation to change in physical conditions. Anthropologist... as a supplement to it, as the main means of human adaptation to the world. This view of culture as a symbolic system with adaptive functions, which varies from...

Biodiversity

...d allow to ensure continued possibilities both for adaptation and future use by people, assuring environmental sustainability . As a consequence, biologists argued that this measure is likely to be associated with the variety of genes. Since it cannot always be said which genes are more likely to prove bene...

Archaea

...rol- ether lipids. These differences may be an adaptation on the part of Archaea to hyperthermophily . Archaeans also have flagella that are notably different in composition and development from the superficially similar flagella of bacteria. A phylogenetic tree based on rRNA data, showing ...

Alternative splicing

...ability for a functional new protein.Therefore the adaptation to new environments can be much faster - with fewer generations - than in prokaryotes. This might have been one very important step for multicellular organisms with a longer life cycle....

Adaptive radiation

...ew parts of its environment. An example of general adaptation is bird flight. Environmental change. A species that can, in contrast to the other species in the ecosystem, successfully survive in a radically changed environment will probably branch into new species that cover the new ecological niches create...