5 The 5 Reasons Free Evolution Is Actually A Positive Thing

What is Free Evolution?

Free evolution is the concept that the natural processes of living organisms can lead them to evolve over time. This includes the appearance and development of new species.

This is evident in many examples such as the stickleback fish species that can live in salt or fresh water, and walking stick insect types that are apprehensive about specific host plants. These typically reversible traits cannot explain fundamental changes to the basic body plan.

Evolution by Natural Selection

The development of the myriad living organisms on Earth is a mystery that has intrigued scientists for decades. The best-established explanation is Darwin's natural selection process, a process that is triggered when more well-adapted individuals live longer and reproduce more successfully than those who are less well-adapted. Over time, a population of well-adapted individuals increases and eventually becomes a new species.

Natural selection is a cyclical process that is characterized by the interaction of three elements: variation, inheritance and reproduction. Sexual reproduction and mutation increase the genetic diversity of an animal species. Inheritance refers to the transmission of a person's genetic traits, which include recessive and dominant genes, to their offspring. Reproduction is the process of producing fertile, viable offspring. This can be achieved by both asexual or sexual methods.

Natural selection is only possible when all the factors are in balance. For example, if a dominant allele at one gene allows an organism to live and reproduce more often than the recessive allele, the dominant allele will become more common within the population. However, if the gene confers an unfavorable survival advantage or decreases fertility, it will be eliminated from the population. This process is self-reinforcing, which means that the organism with an adaptive characteristic will live and reproduce far more effectively than one with a maladaptive characteristic. The higher the level of fitness an organism has, measured by its ability reproduce and endure, is the higher number of offspring it produces. People with good characteristics, such as a long neck in giraffes, or bright white color patterns on male peacocks, are more likely than others to live and reproduce and eventually lead to them becoming the majority.

Natural selection is an element in the population and not on individuals. This is a crucial distinction from the Lamarckian theory of evolution which holds that animals acquire traits through use or lack of use. For instance, if the Giraffe's neck grows longer due to stretching to reach prey, its offspring will inherit a larger neck. The length difference between generations will continue until the giraffe's neck gets too long to not breed with other giraffes.

Evolution through Genetic Drift

In genetic drift, alleles at a gene may attain different frequencies in a group by chance events. At some point, only one of them will be fixed (become common enough to no longer be eliminated by natural selection), and the other alleles will drop in frequency. In the extreme it can lead to one allele dominance. The other alleles are virtually eliminated and heterozygosity decreased to zero. In a small number of people, this could result in the complete elimination of recessive gene. Such a scenario would be called a bottleneck effect, and it is typical of evolutionary process that occurs when a lot of individuals migrate to form a new population.

A phenotypic  bottleneck can also occur when the survivors of a disaster like an outbreak or mass hunting incident are concentrated in the same area. The surviving individuals will be largely homozygous for the dominant allele which means that they will all have the same phenotype and will therefore share the same fitness characteristics. This situation could be caused by earthquakes, war, or even plagues. Regardless of the cause, the genetically distinct population that remains is prone to genetic drift.

Walsh, Lewens, and Ariew utilize Lewens, Walsh, and Ariew use a "purely outcome-oriented" definition of drift as any departure from the expected values for different fitness levels. They give a famous instance of twins who are genetically identical and have the exact same phenotype but one is struck by lightening and dies while the other lives and reproduces.

This kind of drift can play a significant role in the evolution of an organism. However, it is not the only way to progress. The most common alternative is a process called natural selection, where the phenotypic variation of a population is maintained by mutation and migration.

Stephens claims that there is a major difference between treating drift as a force, or an underlying cause, and considering other causes of evolution such as mutation, selection, and migration as forces or causes. Stephens claims that a causal process model of drift allows us to differentiate it from other forces, and this distinction is crucial. He argues further that drift has both a direction, i.e., it tends to reduce heterozygosity. It also has a size that is determined by population size.

Evolution by Lamarckism

When high school students study biology, they are often introduced to the work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 - 1829). His theory of evolution is commonly called "Lamarckism" and it states that simple organisms develop into more complex organisms via the inheritance of characteristics which result from an organism's natural activities usage, use and disuse. Lamarckism is typically illustrated with an image of a giraffe that extends its neck to reach leaves higher up in the trees. This would cause the longer necks of giraffes to be passed on to their offspring who would then become taller.

Lamarck was a French Zoologist. In his opening lecture for his course on invertebrate Zoology at the Museum of Natural History in Paris on the 17th of May in 1802, he presented a groundbreaking concept that radically challenged previous thinking about organic transformation. In his opinion living things evolved from inanimate matter through an escalating series of steps. Lamarck wasn't the first to make this claim, but he was widely regarded as the first to provide the subject a comprehensive and general overview.

The dominant story is that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and Lamarckism fought in the 19th century. Darwinism ultimately won, leading to what biologists refer to as the Modern Synthesis. The theory argues that acquired traits are passed down from generation to generation and instead argues that organisms evolve through the selective influence of environmental elements, like Natural Selection.

Although Lamarck endorsed the idea of inheritance through acquired characters and his contemporaries also offered a few words about this idea but it was not an integral part of any of their theories about evolution. This is partly because it was never tested scientifically.

It has been more than 200 year since Lamarck's birth and in the field of genomics, there is an increasing evidence base that supports the heritability acquired characteristics. This is also known as "neo Lamarckism", or more often epigenetic inheritance. This is a version that is just as valid as the popular Neodarwinian model.

Evolution by adaptation

One of the most common misconceptions about evolution is being driven by a fight for survival. In reality, this notion is inaccurate and overlooks the other forces that drive evolution. The struggle for existence is more accurately described as a struggle to survive in a particular environment. This can include not only other organisms, but also the physical environment itself.

Understanding the concept of adaptation is crucial to understand evolution.  evolutionkr  refers to a specific characteristic that allows an organism to live and reproduce in its environment. It can be a physiological structure, such as fur or feathers or a behavioral characteristic, such as moving into the shade in hot weather or coming out at night to avoid the cold.

The ability of a living thing to extract energy from its surroundings and interact with other organisms as well as their physical environment, is crucial to its survival. The organism needs to have the right genes to produce offspring, and it should be able to find sufficient food and other resources. The organism must also be able reproduce itself at an amount that is appropriate for its niche.

These elements, along with mutations and gene flow, can lead to a shift in the proportion of different alleles within the population's gene pool. As time passes, this shift in allele frequency can lead to the emergence of new traits, and eventually new species.

Many of the features that we admire in animals and plants are adaptations, for example, lungs or gills to extract oxygen from the air, feathers or fur to protect themselves and long legs for running away from predators and camouflage to hide. To comprehend adaptation, it is important to distinguish between behavioral and physiological traits.

Physical traits such as large gills and thick fur are physical characteristics. Behavioral adaptations are not an exception, for instance, the tendency of animals to seek out companionship or move into the shade in hot temperatures. It is important to keep in mind that the absence of planning doesn't result in an adaptation. Inability to think about the effects of a behavior even if it appears to be rational, could cause it to be unadaptive.