SYSTEMATICS Greatly varies.

HISTORY OF LIFE ON EARTH Pleistocene Epoch (about 2.6 million to 11,700

Years ago)
Geologic Time Scale
-Some 40 percent of the existing genera of large
*the extensive interval of time occupied by the mammals in Africa and more than 70 percent In North
geologic history of Earth Formal geologic time begins America, South America, and Australia went extinct.
at the start of the Archean Eon (4.0 billion to 2.5
billion years ago) and continues to the present day.
Present-day extinction rate
*“Calendar” of events in Earth’s history
-One and five species per year resulting to loss of
*Earth history that is represented by and recorded in
between 30 and 50 percent of extant species by the
the planet’s rock strata.
middle of the 21st century.
–Eons are the longest portion of geologic time. Three
Mass Extinction
eons are recognized: The Phanerozoic Eon (dating
From the present back to The beginning of the Conspicuous declines in diversity fossil record reveals
Cambrian Period), The Proterozoic Eon, and The five unusually large extinctions, each involving the
Archean Eon. Less Formally, eon often refers to a span demise of vast numbers of species.
of one billion years.
Permian extinction
-Eras - are the second Longest).Ten eras are recognized
by the international Union of Geological Sciences. -Eliminated about half of all families, some 95

- Period- the basic unit of The geologic time scale; Percent of marine species, and about 70 percent of land
during these spans of time specific systems of rocks species.
were formed.
Fossil Record
• Epoch-unit of geological time
-Original substance of the hard parts of the organism is
preserved

during which a rock series is deposited. -Original components have been replaced by minerals
deposited from water seeping through the rock.
Extinction
-Mold of the shape of the plant or animal remains.
The dying out or extermination of a species.
Continental Drift Theory
An ongoing feature of Earth’s flora and fauna
*200 million years ago, at the start of the Mesozoic
Causes of extinction era, all the continents were attached to one another in a
single landmass.
A.Environmental forces
Geological Evidences
Habitat fragmentation
•In both mineral content and age, the rocks in a region
Global change
on the east coast of Brazil match precisely those found
Natural disaster in Ghana on the west coast of Africa.

Overexploitation of species for human use •The low mountain ranges and rock types in eastern
Canada and the New England region of the United
B.Evolutionary changes in members States appear to be continued in parts of Great Britain,
France, and Scandinavia.
Genetic inbreeding
•India and the southern part of Africa both show
Poor reproduction evidence of periodic glaciation during Paleozoic times
Decline in population numbers (even though both are now close to the equator). The
pattern of glacial deposits in the two regions match
Rates of Extinction
each other and glacial deposits found in South Characteristic of Planet Earth 4 Billion years ago
America, Australia, and Antarctica.
• Contained less molecular oxygen
Fossils
• Subjected to strong radiation
•Fossil reptile species found in South Africa are also
found in Brazil and Argentina. • Earth and its moon are about 4.54 Ga.

•Fossil amphibians and reptiles found in Antarctica are • Estimate is based on evidence from radiometric
also found in South Africa, India, and China. dating of meteorite material together with other
substrate material from the Earth and the moon.
•Most of the marsupials alive today are confined to
South America and Australia. If these two continents Prokaryotes, the First Inhabitants of Earth
were connected by Antarctica in the Mesozoic, as the
• Prokaryotes were the first forms of life on earth,
theory suggests, one .ight expect to find fossil
existing for biillions of years before plants and animals
marsupials there. In March 1982, this prediction was
appeared.
fulfilled with the discovery in Antarctica of the
remains of Polydolops, a 2.7 meter marsupial. CHARACTERISTICS

• Probably were adapted to very high temperatures.

Alvarez Hypothesis • Flourished where they were more protected, such as
in ocean depths or beneath the surface of the earth
-In the 1980s, Louis Alvarez, his son Walter, and their
colleagues proposed that a giant asteroid or comet • Prokaryotic cell fossils date to almost 3.5 billion
striking the Earth some 66 million years ago caused the years ago
massive die-off at the end of the Cretaceous Period.
The impact is hypothesized to have generated so much • Most prokaryotes do not have distinctive
dust and gases that skies were darkened all over the morphologies
Earth, photosynthesis declined, and global
• Fossil shapes cannot be used to distinguish
temperatures dropped. As many as 75% of all species,
including most dinosaurs, became extinct. •Chemical fossils of unique lipids are more informative
because such compounds do not occur in other
-The key piece of evidence for the Alvarez Hypothesis
organisms
was the finding of thin deposits of clay containing the
element iridium at the interface between the rocks of • The oldest traces of archean and eukaryotic lipid
the Cretaceous and those of the Paleogene Epoch come from Greenland of, in Earth’s oldest sediments,
(called the K-Pg boundary after the German word for which formed 3.8 billion years ago.
Cretaceous). Iridium is a rare element on Earth but
occurs in certain meteorites at concentrations Evolution of Prokaryotes
thousands of times greater than in the Earth’s crust.
• Carl Woese and colleagues proposed that all life on
Unit 1-Continuation earth evolved along three domains.

Features of Early Life -Domain Bacteria comprises all eubacteria (a type of

prokaryote)
How did life on earth begun?
-Domain Archaea comprises the archaeans (also a type
I.Organic Molecules were synthesized from of prokaryote)
inorganic .olecules.
-Domain Eukarya comprises all eukaryotes, jncluding
II.Assembly of organic molecules organisms in the kingdoms Animalia, Plantae, Fungi,
and Protista.
into large macromolecules
Prokaryotic Life: Microbial Mats

• Microbial mats, or large biofilms, may represent the

III.Generate more of self identical in composition and
earliest forms of life on earth
structure
• Fossil evidence of their presence starting about 3.5
IV.Assembly of macromolecules assembled into a
billion years ago.
system separate from their surroundings
• A microbial mat is a multi-layered sheet of -A science that includes and encompasses traditional
pprokaryote taxonomy, the description, identification,
nomenclature, and classification of organisms, and
that includes mostly bacteria, but also archaea that has as its primary goal the reconstruction of
phylogeny, or evolutionary history of Life.
• Prokaryotes in a microbial mat are held together by a
glue-like sticky substance that they secrete called -founded in the principles of evolution, its major
extracellular matrix. premise being that there is one Phylogeny of life.
•The different species of prokaryotes that comprise the -Goal of systematics: discover Phylogeny
mats use different metabolic pathways, which is the
reason for their varied colors. Evolution

•Stromatolite is a sedimentary structure formed when -means change as the cumulative changes occurring
minerals are precipitated out of water by prokaryotes in since the origin of the universe some 15 billion years
a microbial mat ago.

• Stromatolites form layered rocks made of carbonate Biological evolution

or silicate
-The evolution of life
• These fossilized microbial mats represent the earliest
record of life on earth. -May be defined as descent with modification.

Adaptations to harsh environment Descent

• Prokaryotes have a cell wall that allows them to -The transfer of genetic material from parent(s) to
survive in both hyper- and hypo-osmotic conditions. offspring over time.

• Some soil bacteria can form endospores that resist “All life has been derived from preexisting life”
heat and drought, thereby allowing the organism to
-occur by simple clonal reproduction (e.g. single
survive until favorable conditions recur.
bacterial cell) parent dividing by fission to form two
Extremophiles offspring cells or a land plant giving rise to a
vegetative propagule.
• Extremophiles “lovers of extremes”. Found in all
kinds of environments: the depth of the oceans, hot -may also occur by complex sexual reproduction, in
springs, the Arctic and the Antarctic, in very dry which each of two parents produces specialized
places, deep inside the Earth, in harsh chemical gametes, each of which has half the complement of
environments, and in high radiation environments. genetic material, the result of meiosis.

Groups of Extremophiles Descent through time results in the formation of a

lineage or clade. Lineage or clade is a set of organisms
• Acidophiles organisms that live in acidic (low pH) interconnected through time and space by the transfer
conditions of genetic material from parents to offspring.

• Thermophiles organisms live in hot environments are Modification

called
-A component of evolution that refers to a change in
• Alkaliphiles organisms that live in alkaline the genetic material that is transferred from parent(s) to
offspring.
• Halophiles organisms that live in salty environment
Cause:
Hypersaline Environment
Mutation
• Environments concentrated with seawater.
Mutation is a direct alteration of DNA (or by genetic
• In the Dead Sea, the sodium concentration is 10 recombination) whereby existing genes are reshuffled
times higher than that of seawater. in different combinations.

Unit II Meiosis

Systematics • also called reduction division

• division of a germ cell involving two fissions of Natural Selection

The nucleus and giving rise to four gametes, or sex Natural selection is the differential contribution of
cells, each possessing half the number of chromosomes genetic material from one generation to the next.
of the original cell.
Genetic combinations result in increased survival or
Population and Species reproduction are contributed to a greater degree.

The general units of evolution are populations and Speciation

species.
An ultimate result of evolution is speciation, the
-A population is a group of individuals of the same formation of new species from preexisting species.
species that is usually geographically delimited and
that typically have a significant amount of gene Speciation can follow lineage divergence, the splitting
exchange. of one lineage into two, separate lineages

Species -a distinct lineage that, in sexually reproducing Lineage divergence is itself a means of increasing
evolutionary diversity. If two, divergent lineages
Organisms- consists of a group of generally remain relatively distinct, they may change
intergrading, interbreeding populations that are independently of one another, into what may be
essentially reproductively isolated from other such designated as separate species.
groups.
Unit 2.2
Example:
Component Fields of Taxonomy
Species- species of sparrow
Description
Population- population of sparrow
-Assignment of features or attributes to a taxon
“Evolution is descent with modification occurring by a features are called characters. Two or more features are
change in the genetic makeup (DNA) of populations or called character states.
species over time.”
Character: Leaf Margins
How does evolution happen?
Character States:
Two major mechanisms:

(1)Genetic drift- genetic modification is random.

(2)natural selection- which genetic change is

directed and nonrandom.

Description

Descriptive character and character state terms are

tools of communication, for concisely categorizing and
delimiting the attributes of a taxon, an organism, or
some part of the organism.
An accurate and complete listing of these features is
one of the major objectives and contributions of
taxonomy.

Identification

The process of associating an unknown taxon with a

known one or recognizing that the unknown is new to
science and warrants formal description and naming.

A taxonomic key is perhaps the most utilized of

identification devices.

Dichotomous key- the most common, used in virtually

all foras.

Nomenclature

Formal naming of taxa according to standardized

system these formal names are known as scientific
names, which by convention are translated into the
Latin language.

The fundamental principle of nomenclature is that all

taxa may bear only one scientific name.

The scientific name of a species traditionally consists

of two parts (which are underlined or

Italicized): the genus name and the species epithet.

Genus is always capitalized

• Species epithet is not capitalized

• Underlined or italized

Ex. California Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia)

Species names are known as binomials (literally

meaning two names ) this type of nomenclature is
called binomial nomenclature

• First formalized in the mid-18th century by Carolus

Linnaeus.

Arrangement of entities (in this case, taxa) into some

type of order. The purpose of classification is to
provide a system for cataloguing and expressing
relationships between these entities.

There are two major means of arriving at a classi

cation:

Phenetic and phylogenetic

Phenetic classification is that based on overall

similarities.

Phylogenetic classification is that which is based on

evolutionary history, or pattern of descent, which may
or may not correspond to overall similarity.
 Another aspect: evolution of life has proceeded in
branching pattern, with the tremendous variety of
modern species being descended from a common
ancestor.

Natural Selection: Simply put, some kinds of

individuals in a population tend to contribute more
offspring to the next generation than do others.
Provided that the offspring resemble their parents, any
attribute of an organism causing it to leave more
offspring than average will increase in frequency in the
population over time. The composition of the
population will then change.

Some History
•Maupertius

•Diderot

-Darwin was not the first to question the idea that

species were fixed, although it was certainly the
commonly held belief at his time.

-The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck put

forward the idea that species changed over time in
1809 in his book Philosphie Zoologique. His process,
though, was very different from that imagined by
Darwin fifty years later. Lamarck suggested the idea
of transformism. He did not suggest that lineages
branched and went extinct.

Lamarck’s Theory actually had two parts:

•Transformism

•Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics.

Topic 1. Lectures 1-2. Basic Concepts of Evolutionary

Biology

What is Evolution of Life?

Evolutionary Biology
Evolutio = unrolling (Latin).
“….a beautifully simple and easily understood idea –
evolution by natural selection – can be scientifically As time flows, organisms which currently represent a
tested in all these fields. It is one of the most powerful lineage, a succession of organisms connected to each
ideas in all areas of science, and is the only theory that other by ancestor-descendent relationships, keep
can seriously claim to unify biology.” changing slowly and deviate more and more from the
original ancestors.
-Evolution: change in living things by descent with
modification. -Darwin called this phenomenon descent with
modification and now we call it evolution.
-The change may be range from DNA sequences to
behavior. -Evolutionary Biology is a science studying origin of
organisms with new qualities.
-Evolution depends on external environmental change
and on random genetic changes. That means that the -Any substantial change of life is a fair game for
future course of evolution is unpredictable, unless we evolutionary biology.
can specify future conditions.
Modern life is diverse and complex.
The central claim of Evolutionary Biology is that
modern life is a product of long evolution in the past.

Thus, Evolutionary Biology has two basic tasks – to

explain diversity and complexity of life.

30 Basic Concepts of Evolutionary Biology

1. Anagenesis, Cladogenesis.

2. Phase space, Determinism, Space of genotypes.

3. Levels of organization, Phenotype, Trait, Fitness,

Adaptation.

4. Mutation, Variation, Population, Selection, Allele

replacement.

5. Fitness landscape.

6. Similarity, Relatedness, Compatibility,

Connectedness.

7. Clade, Species.

8. Complexity, Optimality, Evolvability, Designability.

9. Stochasticity, Random drift.

10. Microevolution, Macroevolution.