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Evolution

Ch. 1 of 8
— CH. 1 · INTRODUCTION —

Contents

Evolution

8 sections

  • Evolution is the change, over successive generations, in the inherited characteristics of biological populations. In July 2016, scientists reported identifying a set of 355 genes belonging to the last universal common ancestor, known as LUCA. Every organism alive today descends from that one ancestor. Bacteria, plants and people all trace back to it. Yet the living world shows no sign of such a narrow beginning. Countless species fill the planet, each fitted to its own surroundings, and most species that ever lived are gone. What actually changes inside a population when it evolves, and where does the raw material for change come from? What pushes some traits to spread while others fade? How did simple cells give rise to this variety, and how did people come to see that any of it was happening? The answers run from the molecules inside a single cell to ancient rocks in Western Australia. They begin with something much smaller than a species: how one trait gets passed from parent to child.

  • Brown eyes make a clean example of inheritance. A child may receive the brown-eye trait from a parent, carried by genes. The full set of an organism's genes is its genotype, and the full set of observable traits is its phenotype. Not every observable trait passes on. A suntan comes from genotype meeting sunlight, so children do not inherit it. What they inherit is the capacity to tan. People with albinism, who do not tan at all and burn easily, show how much that capacity can differ.

    DNA is the molecule that carries the message, a long chain built from four types of bases. Their order works like letters spelling out a sentence. Before a cell divides, its DNA is copied, so both daughter cells inherit the same sequence. A stretch that specifies one functional unit is a gene. Each long strand is a chromosome, and a gene's position along it is a locus. Where the sequence at a locus differs between individuals, each version is called an allele.

    Roughly half of the mutations in the protein-coding regions of genes do harm, and the other half make no difference. A small percentage give a benefit. Mutations elsewhere in the genome are mostly neutral. Sometimes a mutation copies a large stretch of a chromosome, and the spare copy of a gene becomes raw material for something new. The human eye senses light with four genes, three for colour vision and one for night vision, and all four descend from a single ancestral gene. While one copy keeps its old job, the other is free to take on a new one. Genes can also be assembled from borrowed parts. Polyketide synthases, the large enzymes that make antibiotics, contain up to 100 independent domains, each handling one step like a station on an assembly line. Mutation also shows up in the farmyard. Wild boar piglets carry dark and light stripes as camouflage, but mutations in a gene called MC1R disrupt that pattern, and most pig breeds carry such mutations.

    John Maynard Smith described a two-fold cost of sex. In species with separate sexes, only one sex can bear young. And a sexually reproducing parent hands on just 50% of its genes to any one offspring. Even so, sexual reproduction is the more common strategy among eukaryotes and multicellular organisms. The Red Queen hypothesis explains this as a way to keep adapting to other species that are also changing. A rival idea holds that sex mainly evolved to repair damaged germline DNA accurately, with extra diversity as a byproduct.

    Mice moving between inland and coastal populations carry genes with them, and so does pollen blowing between heavy-metal-tolerant and heavy-metal-sensitive grasses. This movement is called gene flow. Between species it includes hybrids and horizontal gene transfer, the passing of genes to an organism that is not an offspring. Bacteria do this most often, which is how antibiotic resistance spreads so fast. Genes from bacteria have also reached the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and the adzuki bean weevil Callosobruchus chinensis. The bdelloid rotifers have gathered genes from bacteria, fungi and plants. Viruses can ferry DNA across even wider gaps. The ancestors of eukaryotic cells exchanged genes with bacteria while acquiring chloroplasts and mitochondria, and eukaryotes themselves may have arisen from transfers between bacteria and archaea.

    Some heritable change does not touch the DNA sequence at all. DNA methylation, gene silencing by RNA interference and the three-dimensional shape of proteins such as prions can all carry information forward. Inheritance can reach beyond the body, too. Organisms that repeatedly reshape their environment, a process called niche construction, leave a legacy that alters selection on later generations. Cultural traits pass on in a similar way. All of this variation matters only once something decides which versions get passed on, and the first candidate is a moth population in which the allele for black colour becomes steadily more common.

  • Four observable facts about living things add up to natural selection. More offspring are born than can survive. Individuals differ in form, physiology and behaviour. Those differences change the odds of surviving and reproducing, and they can be inherited. The next generation is therefore drawn disproportionately from parents whose traits suit their surroundings.

    Fitness is not a head count of offspring. Picture an animal that survives well and breeds quickly, but whose young are all too small and weak to live. It would add almost nothing to future generations and would have low fitness. The true measure is the proportion of later generations that carry its genes. Because environments change, a once-harmful trait can become useful. Lost traits rarely return in identical form, but dormant genes that were only suppressed can reawaken. That explains throwbacks called atavisms, such as hindlegs in dolphins, teeth in chickens, wings in wingless stick insects, and tails and extra nipples in humans.

    Height is a handy trait for showing how selection can act on a range of values. Directional selection shifts the average, so organisms slowly grow taller. Disruptive selection favours both extremes and punishes the middle, so short and tall individuals thrive while medium ones do not. Stabilising selection does the opposite. It penalises both extremes, shrinks the variation, and leaves organisms of similar height.

    Selection can act at several levels at once. Transposons are genes that replicate and spread through a genome, which is selection below the level of the individual. Group selection, above that level, may allow cooperation to evolve. Sexual selection is a special case that rewards whatever wins mates. Cumbersome antlers, mating calls, large body size and bright colours can all attract predators. Males carrying these hard-to-fake traits pay with survival but gain in reproductive success.

    Chance alone can also reshape a population. Genetic drift is the random wobble of allele frequencies from one generation to the next, a kind of sampling error. When selection is weak or absent, an allele is as likely to drift up as down, until it either vanishes or takes over completely. Two populations that start identical can drift into different sets of alleles. Fixation happens faster in smaller populations, and what counts is the effective population size, usually smaller than the headcount. The neutral theory of molecular evolution says most genetic change comes from drift fixing neutral mutations. That version has been debated, and a nearly neutral theory is better supported.

    Other forces complicate the picture. J. B. S. Haldane and Ronald Fisher argued that mutation is too weak a pressure to steer evolution against selection. That view held for a long time, until the molecular era revived interest in neutral evolution. The identification of a mutator strain of E. coli biased toward GC bases in 1967 helped make mutational explanations plausible again. Recombination happens only about twice per chromosome per generation. Genes sitting close together are therefore inherited as a group, called a haplotype. When one allele in a haplotype is strongly beneficial, selection drives a sweep that carries its neighbours along, an effect known as genetic hitchhiking. Measuring how much of evolution comes from selection and how much from neutral processes is difficult, and it remains an active area of research.

  • The bones inside a bat's wing closely resemble those in a mouse's foot and a primate's hand. All three descend from one ancestral mammalian structure, adapted in different directions. Adaptation works by gradually modifying what already exists rather than building from scratch. Even organs that look unrelated can share a toolkit. The eyes of arthropods, squid and vertebrates all depend on a common set of homologous genes, a pattern called deep homology.

    Hip bones in whales and snakes show what happens when a structure loses its job. Such vestigial structures include the non-functional remains of eyes in blind cave-dwelling fish and wings in flightless birds. In humans they include wisdom teeth, the coccyx, the vermiform appendix and goose bumps. Many traits that look like simple adaptations are really exaptations, structures that started with one function and became useful for another. The African lizard Holaspis guentheri has a head so flat, evolved for hiding in crevices, that it helps the animal glide from tree to tree. Inside cells, the bacterial flagellum and protein sorting machinery were assembled from pre-existing proteins with other duties. Enzymes from glycolysis and xenobiotic metabolism were recruited as the structural proteins called crystallins in the lenses of eyes. Development can be rewired as well. In mammals, embryonic bones that form the jaw in other animals instead become part of the middle ear.

    Bacteria give the fastest demonstrations of adaptation. In a long-term laboratory experiment, Escherichia coli evolved the ability to use citric acid as a nutrient. Flavobacterium evolved a novel enzyme that lets it grow on the by-products of nylon manufacturing. The soil bacterium Sphingobium evolved an entirely new metabolic pathway to degrade the synthetic pesticide pentachlorophenol. Adaptation can also mean losing a feature. Bacteria resist antibiotics by modifying the drug's target or by boosting transporters that pump the drug out of the cell.

    The rough-skinned newt makes tetrodotoxin, and its predator, the common garter snake, has evolved resistance to it. Each advance by one species pressed the other to answer, a cycle called coevolution. The arms race left the newts with high toxin levels and the snakes with matching resistance. Not all such partnerships involve conflict. Mycorrhizal fungi grow inside the cells of plant roots, helping the plant absorb nutrients from soil in return for sugars from photosynthesis, while sending signals that suppress the plant's immune system.

    Cooperation within a species can be even more extreme. In bees, termites and ants, a colony's sterile members feed and guard the few that can reproduce, a system called eusociality. Kin selection helps explain it, because a helper's relatives are likely to carry the same helping alleles. The same logic applies inside a single body. The somatic cells of an animal restrain their own reproduction so that a small number of germ cells can produce offspring. When cells ignore the signals telling them to grow, stay put or die, the result is cancer.

  • In 1942, the evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr gave the Biological Species Concept this wording: "species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups." It is widely used and still disputed. Prokaryotes, for instance, do not reproduce through genetic recombination, which is part of what biologists call the species problem. Some researchers seek one unifying definition, while others accept several. Whatever the definition, two sexual populations must be cut off from breeding with each other before they can become separate species.

    Horses and donkeys can still produce mules, which shows how species that diverged long ago may remain partly compatible. Such hybrids are generally infertile, so selection works against them and the parent species stay distinct. Viable hybrids do occasionally arise, and the grey tree frog is a well-studied case. Speciation has been observed several times, both in laboratories and in nature.

    There are four main geographic routes to a new species. Allopatric speciation, the most common in animals, begins when populations are separated by something like habitat fragmentation or migration. Peripatric speciation starts with a small population isolated in a new environment, where the founder effect speeds genetic change. Parapatric speciation involves no physical barrier. The grass Anthoxanthum odoratum evolved metal resistance near polluted mines, and its flowering time gradually shifted until it was reproductively isolated from its metal-sensitive parent population. Sympatric speciation, with no geographic isolation at all, is rare. Plants manage it more easily than animals by doubling their chromosomes. About 20,000 years ago, Arabidopsis thaliana and Arabidopsis arenosa crossbred to produce a new species, Arabidopsis suecica, and researchers have repeated the feat in the laboratory.

    The fossil record shows short bursts of change separated by long periods in which species barely change. The theory of punctuated equilibrium links the bursts to speciation. Rapid evolution happens in small populations or restricted habitats, which rarely leave fossils behind.

    Nearly every animal and plant species that ever lived is now extinct. The Permian-Triassic extinction event drove approximately 96% of marine species to extinction, and it was even more severe than the better-known Cretaceous-Paleogene event that ended the non-avian dinosaurs. The Holocene extinction event, now underway, is linked to humanity's spread across the globe. Present-day extinction rates are 100-1000 times the background rate, and up to 30% of current species may be gone by the mid 21st century. Human activities are the primary cause. More than 99% of all species that ever lived have died out, yet about 1 trillion species are estimated to exist today, with only one-thousandth of 1% described. Competition for limited resources may explain the steady low-level losses, through the competitive exclusion principle. Mass extinctions work differently. They cut diversity without regard to fitness and then promote bursts of rapid evolution among the survivors.

  • Humans and chimpanzees share 98% of their genomes, and the few places where they differ help date when their common ancestor lived. That is one strand of evidence for common descent. The idea was first deduced from four facts: geographic distributions that local adaptation cannot explain, shared physical similarities, vestigial traits that echo functional ancestral ones, and a nested, family-tree hierarchy of groups. Fossils and comparative anatomy work best for animals with shells, bones or teeth. Bacteria and archaea share too few shapes for their fossils to reveal ancestry. Biochemistry fills the gap, since all living cells use the same basic set of nucleotides and amino acids. Horizontal gene transfer blurs the picture, and some authors prefer the metaphor of a coral of life to a simple tree.

    The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old. Microbial mat fossils survive in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia. Graphite of biological origin sits in 3.7 billion-year-old rocks in Western Greenland, and 4.1 billion-year-old Western Australian rocks hold what researchers call remains of biotic life. Commenting on the Australian findings, Stephen Blair Hedges wrote: "If life arose relatively quickly on Earth, then it could be common in the universe." Highly energetic chemistry is thought to have produced a self-replicating molecule around 4 billion years ago, such as RNA. Half a billion years later, the last common ancestor of all life existed.

    Prokaryotes inhabited the Earth from approximately 3-4 billion years ago, and for the next few billion years their form and cell organisation changed little. Eukaryotic cells emerged between 1.6 and 2.7 billion years ago. Then bacteria were engulfed by eukaryotic cells in a cooperative arrangement called endosymbiosis, and the engulfed bacteria became mitochondria or hydrogenosomes. A second engulfment, of cyanobacterial-like organisms, produced the chloroplasts of algae and plants. Multicellular life began to appear around 1.7 billion years ago, with differentiated cells doing specialised jobs. It arose in multiple independent events, in organisms as varied as sponges, brown algae, cyanobacteria, slime moulds and myxobacteria. In January 2016, scientists reported that a minor genetic change in a single molecule called GK-PID, about 800 million years ago, may have allowed single cells to become many-celled organisms.

    Approximately 538.8 million years ago, a remarkable burst of diversity appeared over around 10 million years, called the Cambrian explosion. Most types of modern animals show up in the fossil record then, alongside lineages that later vanished. One proposed trigger is oxygen building up in the atmosphere from photosynthesis. About 500 million years ago, plants and fungi colonised the land, followed soon by arthropods and other animals. Insects were particularly successful and still make up the majority of animal species. Amphibians first appeared around 364 million years ago. Early amniotes and birds appeared around 155 million years ago, mammals around 129 million, Homininae around 10 million, and modern humans around 250,000 years ago.

    The large animals tend to dominate the story, but the overwhelming majority of species are microscopic prokaryotes, which form about half the world's biomass. Complex life only appears more diverse because it is more noticeable. Evolution has no long-term goal and does not necessarily produce greater complexity, and simple organisms have been the dominant form of life throughout Earth's history.

  • The Greek philosophers Anaximander and Empedocles proposed that one type of organism could descend from another, and the poet Lucretius followed Empedocles in his masterwork De rerum natura. Aristotelianism pulled the other way, treating natural things as realisations of fixed forms within a divine cosmic order. In 1377, the Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun wrote in his Muqaddimah that humans developed from "the world of the monkeys", in a process by which "species become more numerous".

    In the 17th century, the Scientific Revolution rejected the Aristotelian approach, but biology was slow to follow. John Ray defined each plant and animal type as a species that perpetuated its own features. Carl Linnaeus introduced his hierarchical classification in 1735 while still treating species as fixed by divine plan. Others speculated differently. In 1751, Pierre Louis Maupertuis wrote of natural modifications accumulating over generations to produce new species. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, suggested species could degenerate into different organisms, and Erasmus Darwin proposed that all warm-blooded animals could have descended from a single microorganism. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck produced the first full-fledged evolutionary scheme in 1809, in which lineages adapted by inheriting changes caused by use or disuse. Established naturalists condemned it as speculation, and Georges Cuvier insisted species were unrelated and fixed. William Paley's Natural Theology of 1802 argued that complex adaptations proved divine design, and Charles Darwin admired it.

    Charles Darwin broke from fixed types by thinking in terms of variable populations. He called his idea descent with modification. Partly influenced by Thomas Robert Malthus's 1798 essay on population, he saw that limited resources would set up a "struggle for existence" in which favourable variations prevailed. Darwin developed his theory from 1838 onwards. In 1858, while he was writing up a "big book" on the subject, Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a version of virtually the same theory. Their separate papers were presented together at a meeting of the Linnean Society of London that year. Darwin's "abstract", On the Origin of Species, appeared at the end of 1859. Thomas Henry Huxley applied the ideas to humans, providing evidence that humans and apes shared common ancestry, which disturbed some readers.

    Othniel C. Marsh, America's first palaeontologist, unearthed the ancestors of the modern horse. In 1877, he gave an influential speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, tracing vertebrates from fish through to humans. In 1880, his Odontornithes: a Monograph on Extinct Birds of North America described birds with teeth. Darwin wrote to him: "Your work on these old birds & on the many fossil animals of N. America has afforded the best support to the theory of evolution, which has appeared within the last 20 years".

    How traits were inherited stayed a mystery. Darwin offered a provisional theory called pangenesis, but in 1865 Gregor Mendel reported that traits pass on in a predictable manner, and Mendel's laws eventually replaced most of pangenesis. August Weismann showed that heredity passes only through the germ line. Hugo de Vries proposed a mutation theory to explain new variants, which caused a temporary rift between Darwinians and biometricians. In the 1930s, Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright and J. B. S. Haldane gave evolution a statistical footing. The modern synthesis of the 1920s and 1930s joined natural selection with Mendelian population genetics. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick, with a contribution from Rosalind Franklin, published the structure of DNA. In 1973, Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". Evolutionary developmental biology, nicknamed evo-devo, extended the synthesis, and some biologists since the start of the 21st century argue for a further extension to cover epigenetics and cultural inheritance.

    The 1844 reception of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation had already shown how fiercely the subject could divide readers. Today a vast majority of scientists accept the modern evolutionary synthesis, but it remains contentious for some theists. Various religions have reconciled their beliefs with evolution through theistic evolution. Creationists, however, believe it is contradicted by the creation myths of their religions. The most controversial point is human evolution, the claim that humans share ancestry with apes and that mental and moral faculties have natural causes like other inherited traits.

  • For thousands of years, farmers practised artificial selection, deliberately choosing which plants and animals would breed, in the domestication of crops and livestock. Genetic engineering now uses the same principle, with antibiotic resistance genes serving as selectable markers to manipulate DNA. Researchers have also evolved proteins with valuable properties, such as modified enzymes and new antibodies, through repeated rounds of mutation and selection in a process called directed evolution.

    The Mexican tetra is an albino cavefish that lost its eyesight during evolution. When researchers bred together fish from different cave populations, some offspring had functional eyes, because different mutations had occurred in each cave. That result helped identify genes required for vision and pigmentation. Tracing how an organism evolved can reveal the genes needed to build body parts, including genes that may be involved in human genetic disorders.

    In the 1960s, simulations of evolution using evolutionary algorithms and artificial life began in computer science. Ingo Rechenberg's work with evolution strategies, also in the 1960s, made artificial evolution a widely recognised optimisation method for complex engineering problems. John Henry Holland's writing popularised genetic algorithms. Practical uses include the automatic evolution of computer programmes. Evolutionary algorithms now solve multi-dimensional problems more efficiently than software written by human designers.

    Medicine faces evolution as an opponent. Viruses, bacteria, fungi and cancers evolve resistance to the immune defences of their hosts and to pharmaceutical drugs, and agriculture faces the same problem with pesticides and herbicides. It is possible that most of the available antibiotics are nearing the end of their effective life. Predicting how pathogens will evolve, and designing strategies to slow or sidestep it, demands deeper knowledge of the forces driving evolution at the molecular level.

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Natural selection

Updated

Common questions

What is Evolution in biology?

Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when processes such as genetic drift and natural selection act on genetic variation.

What are the main mechanisms of Evolution?

The processes that change DNA in a population include natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. Mutation is the ultimate source of genetic variation, while selection and drift change how common each allele becomes.

Who discovered Evolution by natural selection?

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace developed the theory independently. Their separate papers were presented together at a Linnean Society of London meeting in 1858, and Darwin published On the Origin of Species at the end of 1859.

How old is life on Earth according to Evolution research?

The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old, and the earliest undisputed evidence of life dates from at least 3.5 billion years ago. Microbial mat fossils have been found in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.

What is the Cambrian explosion in the history of Evolution?

The Cambrian explosion was a burst of biological diversity about 538.8 million years ago that lasted around 10 million years. Most types of modern animals appear in the fossil record during this period.

How does Evolution create new species?

New species form through speciation, which requires reproductive isolation between diverging populations. The four geographic modes are allopatric, peripatric, parapatric and sympatric, and allopatric is the most common in animals.

Why does Evolution matter for medicine?

Viruses, bacteria, fungi and cancers evolve resistance to host immune defences and to drugs. Predicting and slowing that evolution is important because most available antibiotics may be nearing the end of their effective life.

All sources

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