1. Dispersal or vicariance?

Regardless of which historical factor has played the most

significant role in shaping the distribution of a species, it is beyond doubt that
biogeography is explained by evolution and is limited by ecological factors. Many
species distribution and diversification trends are explained by considerations of
ecological niches. Even human evolution is a product of climate-driven ecological
change.

A) Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in

geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological
communities often vary in some regular fashion along geographic gradients of
latitude, elevation, isolation and habitat area.
B) Dispersal and vicariance are the two major hypotheses accounting for a taxons
distribution and both are also two conditions in which a species can diverge into
another taxon.
C) Dispersal-vicariance analysis assumes vicariance is the null hypothesis, as species are
generally formed during geographic isolation. Whenever either dispersal or extinction
must be invoked in order to explain a distribution, a "cost" is exacted. The historical
hypothesis that accounts for the species' distributions with the lowest "cost" is
considered the most parsimonious, or optimal, hypothesis.
D) Biogeography is explained by evolution in the sense that evolution is merely a
change, not a change for better or worse. Evolution explains two things: the
occurrence of allopatric speciation or sympatric speciation or parapatric speciation,
and adaptation to environments. Biogeography is the distribution of species and
ecosystems in geographic space and geologic time.
E) Biogeography is limited by ecological factors through the vicariance hypothesis. The
two methods by which ecological factors affect biogeography are range expansion
and jump dispersal- simply put, a species will keep expanding until it reaches a
bottleneck, and those who cross the bottleneck often diverge taxa. Bottlenecks can be
physical barriers such as mountains or islands, or non-physical barriers such as
climate.
F) Ecologists have debated whether or not the numbers of species in many communities
are at an equilibrium. The chief factor presumed to produce consistent community
structure is interactions-especially competition among species. Competition should
tend to prevent the coexistence of species that are too similar in their use of resources.
The result may be a consistent number of sympatric species that partition resources in
consistent ways. Closely related species, with very similar requirements, may have
mutually exclusive distributions. For example, three species of nectar-feeding
honeyeaters occur in the mountains of New Guinea, but each mountain range has only
two species, and those two have mutually exclusive altitudinal distributions.
G) Human evolution is the result of climate- key human adaptations evolved in response
to environmental instability. As climate becomes unfavorable, typically species have
3 responses- extinction, migration, or to become versatile. Some views assume that
certain adaptations, such as upright walking or tool-making, were associated with
drier habitat and the spread of grasslands, an idea often known as the savanna
hypothesis. According to this long-held view, many important human adaptations
 arose in the African savanna or were influenced by the environmental pressure of an
expanding dry grassland.

Variability selection hypothesis- If environmental instability was the key factor favoring human
adaptations, new adaptations would be expected to occur during periods of increased
environmental variability, and these adaptations would have improved the ability of early human
ancestors to deal with habitat change and environmental diversity.

Overall, the hominin fossil record and the environmental record show that hominins evolved
during an environmentally variable time. Higher variability occurred as changes in seasonality
produced large-scale environmental fluctuations over periods that often lasted tens of thousands
of years. The variability selection hypothesis implies that human traits evolved over time because
they enabled human ancestors to adjust to environmental uncertainty and change. The hypothesis
addresses the matter of how, exactly, adaptability can evolve over time.

H) By about 4 million years ago, the genus Australopithecus had evolved a skeletal form
that enabled adjustment to changes in moisture and vegetation. The best current
example of adaptability in Australopithecus is apparent in the skeleton known as
Lucy, which represents Au. afarensis. Lucys 3.18-million-year-old skeleton has a
humanlike hip bone and knee joints coupled with long apelike arms, longer grasping
fingers than in humans, and flexible feet for walking or climbing. This combination
of features, which appears to have characterized Australopithecus for nearly 2 million
years and possibly older hominins, afforded an ability to move around in diverse
habitats by changing the degree of reliance on terrestrial walking and arboreal
climbing. This flexibility may also have characterized earlier hominins such as
Ardipithecus ramidus.
I) The first known stone tools date to around 2.6 million years ago. Making and using
stone tools also conferred versatility in how hominin toolmakers interacted with and
adjusted to their surroundings. Simple toolmaking by stone-on-stone fracturing of
rock conferred a selective advantage in that these hominin toolmakers possessed
sharp flakes for cutting and hammerstones that were useful in pounding and crushing
foods. Basic stone tools thus greatly enhanced the functions of teeth in a way that
allowed access to an enormous variety of foods. These foods included meat from
large animals, which was sliced from carcasses using sharp edges of flakes. Bones
were broken open using stones to access the marrow inside. Other tools could be used
to grind plants or to sharpen sticks to dig for tubers. Tool use would have made it
easier for hominins to obtain food from a variety of different sources. Tool use would
have widened the diet of hominins. Meat, in particular, is a food that was obtainable
in equivalent ways, with similar nutritional value, in virtually any type of habitat that
early humans encountered.
J) Use of symbols.
 2. The great diversity of life can be explained by the astounding amount of genetic variation
brought on by mutations, whether by way of genetic drift or natural selection. This makes
it all the more important to understand how mutations work and how they do not work.
Understanding mutations and how they bring about genetic variation will enable us to
better understand the differences between genetic drift and natural selection, the two
primary mechanisms of evolution.

a) In biology, a mutation is the permanent alteration of the nucleotide sequence of the genome
of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA or other genetic elements. It is traditionally
measure by looking at phenotypic effects, however the strictest definition is a modification in the
germ line, observable or not. This effect can be substitution of a base pair, frameshift mutations,
gene conversions or unequal crossing over in meiosis, transposable elements, etc. But the key
characteristics of a mutation is that it is permanent for the rest of the line and random.

b) If a mutation becomes fixed in a population, it is called a substitution. Mutation is not equal to

evolution, but it is the building blocks of it. Mutations typically have rates, and in a species
generation from generation mutations are bound to appear. Since population size often remains
constant or decreases (or increases but not fast enough), the effects of mutation can be as
follows:

-if the mutation is nonsynonymous but maladaptive, chances are high that it will not make it to
the limited F2 population.

-if the mutation is nonsynonymous but adaptive, chances are high that it will make it to the
limited F2 population. Both this and the prior condition are called the phenomenon of natural
selection.

-if the mutation is synonymous and mating is non-random, after one generation the ratio of the
synonymous mutations will change, and the most prevalent ones have a higher chance of
showing up in the F3 generation. Despite there being no selection pressure, repeated iterations of
generations often result in the domination of one neutral allele over others by pure chance. This
is the phenomenon of genetic drift.

c) Mutations cannot be chosen, and definitely cannot be chosen to be deleterious, advantageous,

or neutral. Mutations are random errors. They are random in the sense that one cannot predict
which genes will undergo mutation (although the chance of undergoing mutations is influenced
by its advantage in the environment). They are NOT random in the sense that all loci are equally
mutable, or all mutations have an equal chance of happening, or that environmental factors
cannot influence mutation rates.

d) Alterations in allelic and genotypic frequencies across generations is the central process
of evolutionary change. Factors that cause the frequency changes are the factors that cause
evolution. These alterations are caused by selection pressure or genetic drift. However, both of
these are not possible without the occurrence of random mutations in genes across generations.
The difference between the models of genetic drift and natural selection is how the phenomenon
of mutations change in frequency. For natural selection, specific mutations or lack thereof are
removed by environmental pressure. For genetic drift, pure chance allows a mutation to
propagate, or prevents a mutation from appearing in the next generation.

3. It may be difficult to understand right away how natural selection is not a directed response to
a need and yet leads to adaptability and survival of a unit of life. It may also be difficult to see
why most products of evolution are considered neutral and arose via genetic drift. But the key to
understanding these is understanding that the intrinsic difference between the two mechanisms of
evolution lies in the way by which they lead to genetic variation.

a) Natural selection dominates phenotypic evolution, however genetic drift dominates

molecular evolution. It is important to understand that evolution simply means to change,
not to be better.
b) natural selection by nature cannot be a directed response to a need. This implies that an
individual can change their genotype and therefore phenotype to some extent to not die
from the environment. How selection actually occurs- first establish that mutations are
random PERIOD, but the environment kills off, say, non A mutations. Over time, only A
mutants will survive, however non A populations did not change to A, they died. It is the
population that adapts and survives, not the individual, and this is what is meant by unit
of life.
c) Genetic drift is a change in allele frequency due to random sampling in a population.
Models with random mutations of non-adaptive alleles often result in the
domination of a gene over iterations, and this randomness is achieved via neutrality
of the mutations. When a change in allele frequency occurs in the next generation, the
generation after that will vary from the new frequency. If A is 40% and B is 60%
prevalent in the population, random chance can make A or B more prevalent in the next,
and over time A has a 40% chance of taking over and so B has 60. Domination of a
random populational change is statistically likely to occur even without selection, and
this simply a statistical phenomenon that occurs and is consistent with models.
d) Genetic drift accounts for most occurrences of evolution due to the following reasons-
most nonsynonymous mutations are maladaptive and weeded out by natural selection and
there is no change (purifying selection). Changes that are neutral are not removed, and
due to the aforementioned models, often domination of one of these neutral changes
occurs. Neutral changes are much more common than positively selected changes due to
the fact that the genetic code that all life has in common with each other is degenerate,
and variations may occur without changing the phenotype. This goes back to the earlier
statement that natural selection dominates phenotypic evolution, however genetic drift
dominates molecular evolution
e) Intrinsic difference between mechanisms of populational change lies in how they lead to
genetic variation-
The standard explanation is that an allele with frequency of X chance of occurring has an
X% chance of being fixed over time. How does this happen, and how is this different
from selection? It is true for both that when X occurs, the chances of X appearing in the
next generation are higher. However, the mechanism by which this happens is different.
For natural selection, what happens is that portions of non-X die, which gives X a higher
percentage of the population. For genetic drift, fixation is proportional to the mutation
rate also, not just the ratio of the existing population of X. According to the neutral
theory, mutations appear at rate in each of the 2N copies of a gene, and fix with
probability 1/(2N). This means that if all mutations were neutral, the rate at which fixed
differences accumulate between divergent populations is predicted to be equal to the per-
individual mutation rate, e.g. during errors in DNA replication; both are equal to . When
the proportion of mutations that are neutral is constant, so is the divergence rate between
populations. This provides a rationale for the molecular clock, although the discovery of
a molecular clock predated neutral theory.