Why did things evolve to require two to reproduce? Wouldn't it be safer and more efficient if an individual in a species could duplicate itself on its own? What are mutations? Describe how mutations contribute to variation within a population. Explain how organisms have evolved physiologically to...
Explain how reciprocal altruism can evolve. What does relatedness have to do with it?Altruism:Altruism refers to specific behaviors that decrease the evolutionary fitness of the organism performing them and increase the fitness of recipient organisms. This seems like it would be unfavorabl...
Our argument proceeds in three steps: First, we argue that agency is important in biology and the philosophy of biology because the science of living organisms must deal with the locus of change or development. Biological “forces,” such as natural selection have been posited as the source of...
it is a population-level trait that cannot impact individual-level fitness. Thus, there is nodirectselective benefit for a gene to escape organellar mutation pressure. While we further explain this notion in the penultimate section, we will first expand on ...
(sensu Pianka et al., 2008) into the autoecol- ogy (or species ecology), which concerns the study of inter- actions between an individual, a population, or a species and its total environment; and synecology (or community ecology), which refers to the study of groups of organisms in...
Understanding how organisms manage to flourish in environments that exceed their own metabolic limitations requires the consideration of the entirety of metabolic processes of the metazoan host and its associated bacteria; in other words, the metaorganism rather than the individual (Bosch and McFall-...
We therefore hypothesize that in the long run, natural populations may instead evolve robustness against Muller's by increasing sensitivity to deleterious mutations, despite the short-term fitness consequences. We call this phenomenon ratchet robustness. Using individual-based simulations, we first confirm...
This sets the scene for evolutionary conflict between males and the sperm that they produce because individual sperm gain more by being selfish, whereas the males can gain more from unselfish sperm. A drive system that exemplifies all the above is segregation distorter (SD) in Drosophila ...
Genes have been built a variety of "machines" to thrive exploiting so that a gene can be considered as one unit survives through many successive and individual bodies. Thus, a gene is defined as a portion of chromosomal material that potentially lasts for enough generations to serve as a unit...
Does evolution try to increase the lifespan of individual organisms? If not, why not? Based on Darwin's Theory of Evolution, which of the following organisms would potentially evolve the fastest? A) A species of mammal that reproduces sexually...