General Terms

• Evolution is a change in a population over time
• Biological evolution is a process that gradually selects the organism that are better adapted to their environment to continuously change life and make all living organisms the way they are today
• Thomas Malthus - 1798 - "An Essay on the Principle of Population", he stated their that population growth of organisms will always depend on the availability of food through competition
• Carolus Linnaeus made "Systema Naturae", where he classified all living things into groups based on their similarities.
• Jean-Baptiste Lamarck made the Lamarckism and the theory of use and disuse
• Lamarckism proposed that the characteristics that an animal acquired during its lifetime in response to life’s struggles or felt needs could be passed on to its offspring. He believed that animals evolve because unfavorable conditions produce needs that animals try to satisfy.
• Theory of use and disuse stated that if certain structures were not used, they would disappear, and if a structure was used often it would develop further.
• Charles Robert Darwin was credited for the theory of natural selection
• November 24, 1859, Darwin published the theory in his book entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and often referred to as the book that shook the world
• Theory of Natural Selection states that the most successful organisms survive and reproduce the next generation, and the unsuccessful ones die out. The traits that they have shown for survival can be passed on through heredity
• Fossil is the remain or a piece of evidence of living things from the past. The most common ones are bone, shells, seeds, etc.
• Petrified Fossils are fossils that formed when minerals replaced the original tissue of the organism, or the hard parts of the organism
• Imprints are formed when thin, soft body structures leave impressions in soft sediments, such as mud. When mud hardens into rock, the imprints are preserved.
• Molds and Casts are formed when an organism is buried in a sediment that turns into a rock
• Molds are formed as empty spaces left in a rock when the soft part of the organism decays and the hard part is dissolved by chemicals
• Casts are formed when mold is filled with another material forming cast, that has the shape of the original organism
• Trace Fossils are also called ichnofossils which are not the remains of actual animals but rather their activities
• Law of superposition states that the oldest rock is at the bottom and the youngest rock is at the top.
• The age of rocks can be estimated by analyzing the elements they contain. Many elements exist as two or more isotopes. Some isotopes are radioactive. Radioactive isotopes undergo a change called radioactive decay
• Radioactive decay happens at a declining rate called half-life
• Carbon-14 is one of the most popular radioactive elements used to date the remains of living things within 50 000 years. Potassium and Uranium are accurate in dating older artifacts.
• Fossil record is the collection of all fossils found on earth
• An embryo is an organism in its early stages of development
• Homologous structure are similar structures that have evolved from the same ancestor, but have different functions
• Analogous structures have the same function, but different anatomical structure
• Vestigial structure are body parts that are inherited, but reduced in size and no longer in use
• Species is defined as a population of organisms that share similar characteristics and interbreed naturally and produce fertile offspring
• Gene Flow is the movement of genes from one generation to the next or from one region to another
• Speciation is the term used to describe the development of new species
• Male Donkey + Female Horse = Mule
• Female Donkey + Male Horse = Hinny
• Migration is the movement of organisms from the place it lives to a new home
• Isolation occurs when some members of the species suddenly become cut off from the rest species
• Geographic Isolation is a portion of an existing population becomes totally isolated from the rest of the members by means of geographical barriers
• Reproductive Isolation also known as genetic isolation have incurred a great deal of genetic differences between them that reproduction cannot occur anymore even if they are brought back together
• Extinction is the loss of an entire species
• mass extinction happens when a large number of species are wiped out in a short period of time
• adaptive radiation is characterized by a rapid increase in the number of kinds of closely related species as they evolve new traits to fill in empty niches
• Coevolution is another pattern seen among organisms particularly common in prey-predator relationship
• Gradualism is a kind of evolutionary change that based on the gradual changes in the features of certain organism