Product Code Database
Evolutionary biology is a subfield of biology that analyzes the four mechanisms of evolution: natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, and gene flow. The purpose of evolutionary biology is to observe the diversity of life on Earth. The idea of natural selection was first researched by Charles Darwin as he studied bird beaks. The discipline of evolutionary biology emerged through what Julian Huxley called the modern synthesis of understanding, from previously unrelated fields of biological research, such as genetics and ecology, systematics, and paleontology. Huxley was able to take what Charles Darwin discovered and elaborate to build on his understandings.
The investigational range of current research has widened to encompass the genetic architecture of adaptation, molecular evolution, and the different forces that contribute to evolution, such as sexual selection, genetic drift, and biogeography. The newer field of evolutionary developmental biology ("evo-devo") investigates how embryogenesis is controlled, thus yielding a wider synthesis that integrates developmental biology with the fields of study covered by the earlier evolutionary synthesis.
These processes are studied at different levels of complexity from observing features in living or fossilized species to analyzing DNA genomic sequencing between species.
Microbiology too is becoming an evolutionary discipline now that microbial physiology and genomics are better understood. The quick generation time of bacteria and viruses such as makes it possible to explore evolutionary questions.
Many biologists have contributed to shaping the modern discipline of evolutionary biology. Theodosius Dobzhansky and E. B. Ford established an empirical research programme. Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright, and J. B. S. Haldane created a sound theoretical framework. Ernst Mayr in systematics, George Gaylord Simpson in paleontology and G. Ledyard Stebbins in botany helped to form the modern synthesis. James Crow, Richard Lewontin, Dan Hartl, Marcus Feldman, and Brian Charlesworth trained a generation of evolutionary biologists.
More recently, the merge between biological science and applied sciences gave birth to new fields that are extensions of evolutionary biology, including evolutionary robotics, engineering, algorithms, economics, and architecture. The basic mechanisms of evolution are applied directly or indirectly to come up with novel designs or solve problems that are difficult to solve otherwise. The research generated in these applied fields, contribute towards progress, especially from work on evolution in computer science and engineering fields such as mechanical engineering.
In evolutionary developmental biology, scientists look at how the different processes in development play a role in how a specific organism reaches its current body plan. The genetic regulation of ontogeny and the phylogenetic process is what allows for this kind of understanding of biology. By looking at different processes during development, and going through the evolutionary tree, one can determine at which point a specific structure came about.Ozernyuk, N.D. (2019) "Evolutionary Developmental Biology: the Interaction of Developmental Biology, Evolutionary Biology, Paleontology, and Genomics". Paleontological Journal, Vol. 53, No. 11, pp. 1117–1133. ISSN 0031-0301.Gilbert, Scott F., Barresi, Michael J.F.(2016). "Developmental Biology" Sinauer Associates, inc.(11th ed.) pp. 785–810. .
Some evolutionary biologists ask the most straightforward evolutionary question: "what happened and when?". This includes fields such as paleobiology, where paleobiologists and evolutionary biologists, including Thomas Halliday and Anjali Goswami, studied the evolution of early mammals going far back in time during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras (between 299 million to 12,000 years ago). Other fields related to generic exploration of evolution ("what happened and when?" ) include systematics and phylogenetics.
The modern evolutionary synthesis was devised at a time when the molecular basis of genes was unknown. Today, evolutionary biologists try to determine the genetic architecture underlying visible evolutionary phenomena such as adaptation and speciation. They seek answers to questions such as which genes are involved, how interdependent are the effects of different genes, what do the genes do, and what changes happen to them (e.g., point mutations vs. gene duplication or even polyploidy). They try to reconcile the high heritability seen in twin studies with the difficulty in finding which genes are responsible for this heritability using genome-wide association studies. The modern evolutionary synthesis involved agreement about which forces contribute to evolution, but not about their relative importance.
Other journals combine aspects of evolutionary biology with other related fields. For example, Molecular Ecology, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B, The American Naturalist and Theoretical Population Biology have overlap with ecology and other aspects of organismal biology. Overlap with ecology is also prominent in the review journals Trends in Ecology and Evolution and Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics. The journals Genetics and PLoS Genetics overlap with molecular genetics questions that are not obviously evolutionary in nature.
|
|
