PREFACE This course has been designed to teach the interested college-level student the fundamentals of evolution. 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. 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 talks about the origins of life and explains what we know about how life has evolved on earth throughout the ages. As you will learn 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. No study of evolution would be complete without a discussion of the history of evolutionary theories, which is the topic of chapter one in the course. We will discuss some of the early evolutionists who gave rise to what we currently believe about how evolution works. We then talk in more detail about evolutionary thought throughout time, including modern evolutionary thinking. The story of Charles Darwin is a good one and will help 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 is 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 will see in this chapter, natural selection relates to fitness in a given environment and an organism s reproductive success. Examples of natural selection are given as well as a discussion of how natural selection relates to complex behaviors in higher-order animals—a phenomenon known as evolutionary psychology. Chapter three in the course talks about the evolutionary relationships between the different types of living things. It starts with a discussion of taxonomy, which is the naming convention used to describe all living things. Every form of life falls under one
1
