Jenna's Evolution Blog (BIOL 540)

Blobfish: The Original "No Bones" Day Animal The Blobfish is an animal most of us may have seen in a meme or otherwise before because they are continuously regarded and one of the ugliest animals to ever exist. Photo evidence appears above. The reason Blobfish look like...that... is because they live extremely close to the ocean floor, between 2000 and 4000 feet below sea level depending on the area. This puts them living at a pressure between 60 and 120 times larger than sea level. To put this into perspective, here is this quote from an article on Australia's Science Channel: " There is so much pressure at that depth a human would feel as if a passenger aircraft was parked on top of them". Another fun fact: these fish don't look entirely this awful in their natural habitat--it's because the pressure on land is so much lower that they start to look like this pile of snot. It takes a lot of interesting adaptation to be able to live in these conditions ne...

If I'm not mistaken, one of the biggest reasons like genetic variation is not eroded over time is because of new mutations arising to create changes in populations. Some of these mutations may be good or bad, and OFTEN (not necessarily always), the bad mutations will be selected against and will go down in frequency. But as we discussed in one of our past classes, if the mutation is in a recessive allele, it will never completely go away as it can be hidden by heterozygote phenotypes, resulting in eventual offspring with the homozygous recessive mutation yet again. Selection doesn't work against heterozygotes here because they present the same as homozygous dominant individuals. In terms of advantageous mutations, it's a little more obvious that these mutations will not go away and will again create genetic diversity that will not be selected against. 

     It has been so incredibly relieving to be able to sit through a lecture and really LISTEN to what is being said and participate while occasionally  writing down notes, compared to other classes where I am constantly scrambling to write things down so I hardly even hear what my professor says. I feel like I am much more involved in the lecture and I'm really learning from it because I'm not just trying to cram in information so I can do well on a test. ALSO: I consider myself to be quite computer-illiterate. I would never think I would be able to put together pieces of code to make graphs and do such cool functions--it makes me really happy and proud of myself because I'm doing something I probably never would have done if it weren't for taking this class.           I would say my first definition of evolution was pretty decent, just the basics of heritable traits changing over multiple generations in a population. However, something...

The biggest possible benefit of inbreeding is when two individuals have an advantageous mutation and they breed together to produce offspring with the same mutation, that is paving the way for adaptation in the population. This would absolutely help lead to the evolution of assortative mating because individuals within populations are figuring out that mating with others like you may help your niche group develop advantages over those in the group that look different. Though there are benefits like this to inbreeding, the costs far outweigh the benefits most of the time. The biggest downfall of inbreeding is the higher likelihood to pass on recessive, deleterious mutations. Under normal breeding, deleterious recessive mutations would be overshadowed by a mating partner with the dominant allele and the offspring wouldn't have to carry the deleterious mutation. Under inbreeding, there is a much higher likelihood that both mating partners will carry the same deleterious mutation that ...