BIOL 4120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Optimism, Hypothesis, Richard Lewontin
15 Jan 2018
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Selection thinking considers whether some trait that you observe on individuals may have evolved in the population by natural selection. Use principles of natural selection as a starting point to generate hypotheses about why a particular trait may exist. Hypothesize that structures and other features of an organism: increase performance at some ecologically relevant task, performance of that task influences components of fitness (survival, reproduction) Selection thinking starts with observing some feature of an organism. This can be anything: a molecule, aspect of physiology, behaviour, morphology or life history (development); a feature of any of these is a trait. We then hypothesize that the trait may have evolved in the population due to natural selection acting on it for some function that could enhance fitness. The 3 steps: define a trait, speculate about its ecological function to an individual (moving, signalling, sensing, speculate about a functional link to fitness (survival and/or reproduction)
