How Did Wallace Contribute To The Theory Of Evolution?
Alfred Russell Wallace, a naturalist -an expert in or student of natural history- Born in Usk, United Kingdom on January 08, 1823, made two expeditions to South America and Indonesia and formulated the modern theory of evolution! Wallace met Charles Darwin at scientific meetings and eventually shared ideas and became friends. Wallace wrote letters to Darwin about this as Darwin also stumbled upon the same results and therefore listed Wallace as an author to the theory of modern evolution on July 1, 1858 to the Linnaean Society in London. Wallace later "wrote a volume entitled Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection in 1870." (Explorers & Discoverers of the World, 1993. Web)
Both Darwin and Wallace concluded that "if an animal has
some trait that helps it to withstand the elements or to breed more successfully, it may leave more offspring behind than others. On average, the trait will become more common in the following generation, and the generation after that."(Understanding evolution, web.) http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/history_14
How cool is that? Does this mean that if our climate becomes more cold like the ice age from 100,000 we would begin to grow more hair and eventually pass on this natural necessity to the next generation? Or perhaps if the weather become blazing hot will we grow gills to dive into the water? Though this may be way too extreme, however, natural selection proposes exactly that! For example, the peppered moth that we studied in module 6 began to evolve into darker varients due to the heavy pollution causing the trees in which they rested to turn darker. They had to change into a darker color to camouflauge with the trees or else they would go extinct because they'd be easy to catch by predators. Another example would be the deer mouse in Nebraska, which instead of turning darker, turned lighter (fur) to match the color of the pale sand in Nebraska to again, avoid predators.
What do you think? Do humans evolve or will we always stay the same? Personally, I'd like to think that our brain evolves....
Both Darwin and Wallace concluded that "if an animal has
some trait that helps it to withstand the elements or to breed more successfully, it may leave more offspring behind than others. On average, the trait will become more common in the following generation, and the generation after that."(Understanding evolution, web.) http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/history_14
How cool is that? Does this mean that if our climate becomes more cold like the ice age from 100,000 we would begin to grow more hair and eventually pass on this natural necessity to the next generation? Or perhaps if the weather become blazing hot will we grow gills to dive into the water? Though this may be way too extreme, however, natural selection proposes exactly that! For example, the peppered moth that we studied in module 6 began to evolve into darker varients due to the heavy pollution causing the trees in which they rested to turn darker. They had to change into a darker color to camouflauge with the trees or else they would go extinct because they'd be easy to catch by predators. Another example would be the deer mouse in Nebraska, which instead of turning darker, turned lighter (fur) to match the color of the pale sand in Nebraska to again, avoid predators.
What do you think? Do humans evolve or will we always stay the same? Personally, I'd like to think that our brain evolves....