Jenna's Evolution Blog (BIOL 540)

I do think that mutation rates can evolve in populations. The reason I believe this is because within all populations undergoing evolution, there is a struggle to survive, variation, and heritability of traits. All of these together point to some evidence for mutation rates evolving within populations. There was a lot of confusion when discussing this in class about focusing on the RATE of mutations, not the mutations themselves. It's fairly well known to anybody in the sciences that a mutation can be heritable--that's one of many ways that variation in a population is achieved! But the rates of mutation? Are some families genes just more prone to mutation? Yes, they can be! It all starts with the cause of the mutations in the first place, which is more often than not, DNA polymerase.  Mutations in DNA polymerase can in turn cause higher or lower mutation rates in that organism--a less functional DNA polymerase would usually make more mutations, and a more functional DNA polyme...

Fitness in general is something our population does not understand very well, because even in humans, all people assume that being more "physically fit" is what would constitute having the highest fitness in a population. One phrase that often goes along with this topic is the age-old phrase "survival of the fittest", which is usually an attempt compile theories of evolution into one small and not very helpful phrase. After having studied evolution, both in this class and in other biology classes, I realize that "survival of the fittest" doesn't mean that the bodybuilders are going to be the last ones left on earth if some disease, disaster, or predator comes in to wipe all of the "less fit" people out of existence. It means that organisms who are most fit for their environment have the upper hand in survival and ultimately reproduction. I would define fitness as an organism's ability to survive and reproduce successfully in their given e...

I have chosen my favorite prediction Darwin's idea of descent with modification makes, and it is that species change through time (also known as microevolution). I chose this prediction because I know that there are many great examples of this, older and newer, so I feel that it gives very strong and compelling evidence supporting evolution. I found that a more current example of species changing through time is the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in bacteria! This is a huge, ongoing problem in the medical field so I felt that it would be good to discuss how evolution and antibiotic overuse is the reason for this happening. Before explaining antibiotic resistance, it would be beneficial to define antibiotics: " any class of organic molecule that inhibits or kills microbes by specific interactions with bacterial targets, without any consideration of the source of the particular compound or class" (Davies & Davies, 2010). Some strains of bacteria began to develop mu...

 I would say that evolution is a change in genomes or heritable traits over at least one generation. This covers the fact that for a change to be evolution, it has to be something that can genetically be passed down to offspring and show that by occurring over generations. It is also worth noting that evolution cannot happen to an individual--it can only occur in a population (again, over generations). Trying to explain that evolution CAN happen to an individual usually just results in people using incorrect definitions of evolution or assuming that personal change and development is the same as evolving, and that is just simply not the case. The pattern or process by which evolutionary change occurs would be what we call natural selection, also known as the selection for or against different traits due to their fitness for the environment. Environments are always changing, so this is why we see such drastic changes in so many different animals over their life span. Sometimes these...