Summary of Chapter 1

Thoughts

1. Evolution in the Quran, any direct reference to it?
2. "the fittest yet" and not "the est imaginable" does not make sense statistically with the observations available!
3. Islands provide best environment for divergence, similarly, an isolated oasis or human community would develop a diversity of complementary skills in its residents (medical, ...)
4. That's why car parkers sprout out in the city at locations full of higher class people.

Digest

• "Nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution."
• evolutionary adaptation
• theory of evolution by natural selection
• "the fittest available"not "the best imaginable"
• Adaptive variation
• balance between local adaptation and hybridization
• Ecotypes
• Genetic polymorphism
• ocal specialization
• Speciation: two or more new species are formed from one original species
• biospecies
• islands
• diverge
• Species live where they do for reasons that are often accidents of history
• island patterns
• movements of land masses
• climatic changes during the Pleistocene ice ages
• global warming
• convergent evolution
• parallel evolution
• Biomes
• terrestrial biomes
• aquatic biomes
• life form spectra: ecological communities may be very similar even when taxonomically distinct
• Communities comprise a diversity of species: Environmental heterogeneity:
• interactions between predators and prey
• and parasites and hosts
• and mutualists
• and the coexistence of similar species

Questions

1. What is the binding principle in chapter 1?
2. What have you learnt so far after studying chapter 1?