SUMMARY This course was designed to teach the interested college-level student the fundamentals of evolution. As you have come to understand, evolution is a field of science that is continually changing as more is understood about cell biology, genetics, and the study of the early earth environment. You ve learned that the process of evolution involves the adaptation of organisms to their environment and the ways in which organisms find their niche or surpass other organisms in the process of natural selection. The course talked about the origins of life and helped you understand what we know about how life has evolved on earth throughout the ages. As you hopefully learned from the course, evolution is not just a historic event but is a process that continues in today s time and will continue to be part of life on earth in the future. After studying evolution, you now know that no study of evolution would be complete without a discussion of the history of evolutionary theories, which was the topic of chapter one in the course. We talked about some of the early evolutionists who gave rise to what we currently believe about how evolution works. We then discussed in more detail about evolutionary thought throughout time, including modern evolutionary thinking. The story of Charles Darwin is a good one and hopefully helped you understand how his major breakthroughs in the understanding of evolution as a naturalist in the Nineteenth Century helped to pave the way for modern evolutionary thought. The focus of chapter two was natural selection. It is a key evolution-related process involving the ability of different organisms in a population to adapt to its environment and to pass on this adaptability to their offspring. As you have seen in this chapter, natural selection relates to fitness in a given environment and an organism s reproductive success. Examples of natural selection were given as well a discussion of how natural selection relates to complex behaviors in higher-order animals—a phenomenon known as evolutionary psychology.
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