The Evolution of

Populations

Put simply.

Evolution is:
> change
> time
> many individuals

Put simply
Evolution acts on what exists:
natural selection acts upon
inherited traits in changing
environments (selective
pressures)

Darwins handicap.
1. He had no idea how heritable traits
pass from
one generation to the next
2. He had no idea how variation
appeared, even
though variation in heritable traits
was
central to his theory
During the 1930s Evolutionary
biologists

 The widely accepted hypothesis of

the time
that the traits of parents are blended
in their
offspringwould eliminate the
differences in
individuals over time.
Just a few years after Darwin
published On the
Origin of Species, Gregor Mendel
proposed a
model of inheritance that supported
Darwins
theory.

 Mendels particulate hypothesis of

inheritance
stated that parents pass on discrete
heritable
units (genes) that retain their
identities in
offspring.
Although Gregor Mendel and
Charles Darwin
were contemporaries, Darwin never
saw
Mendels paper, and its implications
were not
understood by the few scientists

Darwin + Mendel.
Mendels contribution to
evolutionary theory
was not appreciated until half a
century later.

The modern evolutionary

synthesis integrated Darwinian
selection and Mendelian
inheritance.

synthesis emphasizes:
The importance of populations as the
units of
evolution.
The central role of natural selection as
the most
important mechanism of adaptive
evolution.
The idea of gradualism to explain how
large
changes can evolve as an
accumulation of small
changes over long periods of time.

Straightening the misconception:

It is the population, not the

individual, that evolves.

A population is a localized group of

individuals that
belong to the same species.
A species is a group of natural populations
whose
individuals have the potential to interbreed
and
produce fertile offspring.

Because members of a population

interbreed, they share a common
group of genes called a gene pool

Gene pool - the total aggregate

of genes in a population at any
one time

Evolution as Genetic Change

Evolution is any change over time

in the relative frequency of alleles
in a population.
Alleles are at least 2 forms of a
gene:
Ex: gene for seed coat: Smooth
Recall:
it
is
populations
not
individual
(S)
organisms that can evolve overtime

wrinkled (s)

Sources of Genetic Variation

1. mutations
2. genetic shuffling that
results
from sexual reproduction

1. Mutations
Any change in a sequence of DNA
Mutations can occur because of
Mistakes in DNA replication
Radiation or chemicals in the
environment
Some mutations dont affect the
phenotype
but some do

1. Mutations
By X-ray

Trisomy 21

2. Gene shuffling
The 23 pairs of chromosomes can
produce 8.4M different combinations of
genes
Crossing over
further increases
the number of
different
genotypes

Single Gene and Polygenic Traits

The number of phenotypes produced for a
given trait depends on how many genes
control the trait:
> single-gene
> many genes (polygenic)

1. Single gene trait

Controlled by
a single gene
that has two
alleles
Variation in
these genes
leads to
only 2 distinct
phenotypes

2. Polygenic traits
Traits controlled by two or more genes
Each gene of a polygenic trait has two
or more alleles
As a result one
polygenic trait can
have many possible
genotypes and
Phenotype
Ex: height

Natural Selection on Polygenic

Traits
can affect the distributions of
phenotypes in any of three ways:
1. directional
2. stabilizing
3. disruptive

Individuals
near the
center
of the
curve have
higher
fitness
than
individuals
at either
end of
the curve