The Making of the Fittest

Here I'll steal egregiously.  Luckily, I'm stealing from a generous victim:  the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.  They give first-rate materials to educators for health and the natural sciences.

Dr. Sean Carroll did a wonderful 2005 Holiday Lecture entitled "Evolution:  Constant Change and Common Threads".  You can access this at http://www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/evolution-constant-change-and-common-threads.

Other sections of this Blog look at Meiosis and Life Cycles.  These biological processes perpetuate good information - genetic combinations that allow an organism to grow, thrive, and breed.  But how does this constancy turn into diversity?  Natural Selection!

Darwin wasn't the first to ponder evolution.  Many scientists before him suggested that there was a shift in organism form over time.  Fossil evidence suggested this, and biogeography (the location of various types of creatures tended to be condensed into continuous regions) also lead the best thinkers to think that there might be a shift in organism forms over time.  What Darwin did, though, is link this idea to a mechanism for evolution.  He proposed natural selection which operated on inherent variation in a population.

Here's "The Making of the Fittest".

Now see how this is applied:

When populations are separated and lose the ability to interbreed, you set the stage for speciation.  Give this a few thousand, a few million, even a few billion years, and you're set for an explosion of diversity!