The Five Fingers of Evolution

Vennela Pandaraboyina
1/16/13

The Five Fingers of Evolution

by Paul Anderson

TEDEducation

May 7th, 2012

 

 

 

Summary

     The gist of the video is about evolution, and the process of evolution. It focuses on the the definition of evolution, which is change in the gene pool over time. It explains that the gene pool is just all the different alleles for a gene in a population, and over time the genes just get rearranged, but the frequency of the genes stays the same. It also covers the five processes of evolution. The first is small population, and how chance has a bigger impact on a small population. If a small group of organisms is seperated from the larger group of organisms somehow, then the genes in this small population are the genes in the new gene pool. The seperation of the organisms is done by complete chance, so the changes in the gene pool are also by chance. The next process is mating. The frequency of genes in a population can depend on how often people with a certain allele mated. The next process is mutation, where a mutation in the DNA can lead to a new allele for a gene, which changes the gene pool. The fourth process of evolution is gene flow, where new individuals move into and area or move out of an area, they are changing the gene pool by taking their alleles away from the population. Finally, the most important process of evolution is natural selection. Natural selection leads to adaptation. The genes that make the individual better adapted to the enviroment will do well in the gene pool. If it harms the individual, then its frequency will decline. All of these processes cause microevolution, but can eventually lead to macroevolution, or speciation!

 

Relevance

     The relevance of this video is that we learned about evolution this unit. We talked about natural selection, and how it is the process by which individuals with inherited characteristics well-suited to the enviroment leave more offspring on average than do other individuals, leading those characteristics to become prominent. We also talke about how mutations are the original reasons why there is variation and change in the gene pool, and how it is completely random. We learned about the bottleneck effect and the founder effect, which both involved small populations, chosen by chance, whose genes were the gene pool of the population. This video is a direct correlation to what we learned.