Ian's Thoughts

  Disease-  One disease that I have studied quite a bit is diabetes. Type II diabetes is growing at an alarming rate around the world, In 2018 the CDC estimated that 26.9 million people in the United States alone had been diagnosed with diabetes (RHIhub 2019). What is more alarming, however, and what may give clues about what is causing this disease is the prevalence of type II diabetes in rural areas, at 12.6%, compared to urban areas at 9.9% (RHIhub 2019). It is well known that a large risk factor for type II diabetes is being overweight, or obese. Rural areas have a higher amount of overweight and obese people than urban areas, which may be partly due to it being harder to obtain fresh fruits and vegetables in rural areas compared to urban areas (RHIhub 2019). One study done by the US Diabetes Prevention Program showed that the best way to prevent or slow diabetes is through proper diet and exercise. The study found that increasing the amount of physical activity and decrea...

 Speciation      Speciation, or the act of a population branching off and becoming their own species through evolution, is something that's hard to have a definitive timeline on in my opinion. Speciation in my mind can happen fast or over a long period of time. The tricky part is deciding when their genetics have changed enough that they become their own species. For this you might look at phylogenetic trees to see where the branching off occurred, how far down that branch they are, and if any other species or types of the same species still exist. In a situation where a population's environment gets changed rapidly and stays in the new different conditions, it makes sense that the organisms in the population that are able to survive and adapt to the new changes would produce offspring that is very different from the normal organisms of a species in their normal habitat. In this case, I would expect speciation to happen much sooner than if there was a gradual change ...

 Pipefish      Something evolving like this is very interesting. In most species that have a courting ritual, the male is the elaborate sex that has things like big pretty feathers or something like that to use in courting. However, in pipefish, it is the female. One hypothesis that might explain this weird change is the fact that male pipefish are the ones that carry the eggs and children. Perhaps in species where it is the male that takes care of the offspring, this is the case. Off the top of my head, I know that seahorses also have the male carry the young, so it would be interesting to do research and see if the female is the one courting the male in that species as well. As far as how something like this would evolve in the wild, that's a hard question to answer. Maybe the females had a trait that allowed them to be more successful fighting off predators or other things like that that males would typically do in other species, so they took on a lot of the tradi...

 Phenotype Plasticity -       Phenotypic plasticity is a concept that I struggled to understand fully until recently. I've heard about it in other classes like the genetics class that I have taken previously, but I didn't go into much depth researching it. I would define phenotypic plasticity as "The ability of organisms to produce different phenotypes in response to an external environmental change". I'm not sure where I stand on whether phenotypic plasticity slows down evolution or potentiates evolutionary change. I think it varies based on the situation and the availability of genes in the gene pool. I think if I had to choose one, I would say phenotypic plasticity slows down evolutionary change only because a population doesn't have to make hard changes by evolving when being introduced to a new stimulus in their environment. Instead, they can rely on phenotypic plasticity to change accordingly and if the stimulus goes away, then they can revert back to ho...

 Genetic Variation-      Both genetic variation and natural selection are good things for populations, but selection would not exist without genetic variation. If there were no different traits to choose from, then selection would not be needed. Genetic variation is not eroded over time because even though the simulations done in the R exercises show a tendency for populations to fix on a better trait over time, these are done in closed systems, with the assumption that fitness for specific traits does not change over time. In real life, the ecosystem a population lives in might be very different from one area to the next, even though the same species lives in both. It's safe to assume that one population that lives in one area would not have the ideal traits to live in a different area. Interbreeding between two different populations introduces new genes to the populations, which increases genetic variation. On top of that, ecosystems can change over time. If one tr...

 Taking Stock Since we've begun class, I've realized that there is so much more that contributes to evolution than I had previously thought. The biggest breakthrough to me was realizing that evolution is all caused by mutations. I hadn't completely realized that until this class, I just figured natural selection and genetic drift and other methods of evolution like that just happened. Now, I realize that at the base of it, all evolution is at least in some way started by mutations in genes and DNA that cause the methods of evolution to actually work.  Looking back on my first blog post, I would change a little, but not much. One thing I do need to change, however, is my previous statement that is "Evolution is how organisms change from generation to generation". It should be "Evolution is how overall populations change from generation to generation", this is more accurate as organisms themselves don't evolve, but populations do. My understanding of e...