Essay On Evolution -- essays research papers

Essay on Evolution   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  There are many mechanisms that lead to evolutionary change. One of the most important mechanism in evolution is natural selection which is the differential success in the reproduction of different phenotypes resulting from the interaction of organisms with their environment. Natural selection occurs when a environment makes a individual adapt to that certain environment by variations that arise by mutation and genetic recombination. Also it favors certain traits in a individual than other traits so that these favored traits will be presented in the next generation. Another mechanism of evolution is genetic drift. Genetic drift is a random change in a small gene pool due to sampling errors in propagation of alleles or chance. Genetic drift depends greatly on the size of the gene pool. If the gene pool is large, the better it will represent the gene pool of the previous generation. If it is small, its gene pool may not be accurately represented in the next generation due to sampling error. Genetic drift usually occurs in small populations that contain less than 100 individuals, but in large populations drift may have no significant effect on the population. Another mechanism is gene flow which is when a population may gain or lose alleles by the migration of fertile individuals between populations. This may cause the allele frequencies in a gene pool to change and allow the organism to evolve. The most obvious mechanism would ...