ANT203H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Cenozoic, Late Devonian Extinction, Cambrian Explosion
Document Summary
Loosely follows chapter 4: micro vs macroevolution, what is a species, patterns of macroevolution, speciation and extinction, crash-course on history of life on earth. Descent with modification, change in heritable traits through time: unifying principle of biological evolution: all life on earth shares a common ancestor. Macroevolution: evolutionary change over long time periods. Evolution happening on a small scale within a single population affecting changes in gene frequencies. Microevolutionary processes introduce new variation into a population but on a small scale an accumulation of these changes over the course of millions of years can lead to macroevolution focus of this semester: macroevolution. A basic observation the living world is extremely diverse. Many different kinds of organisms separated in groups. And now like this: the world is diverse is due to billions of years of evolution leading to speciation. For different populations to belong to the same species: be capable of interbreeding, naturally, produce fertile offspring.
