第18章進化と種の起源

The geographic distribution of organisms on the planet follows patterns that we can explain best by evolution in conjunction with tectonic plate movement over geological time. Broad groups that evolved before the supercontinent Pangaea broke up (about 200 million years ago) are distributed worldwide. Groups that evolved since the breakup appear uniquely in regions of the planet, such as the unique flora and fauna of northern continents that formed from the supercontinent Laurasia and of the southern continents that formed from the supercontinent Gondwana. The presence of members of the plant family Proteaceae in Australia, southern Africa, and South America indicates that their ancestors were predominant on the supercontinent Gondwana prior to its breaking up.

Marsupial diversification in Australia and the absence of other mammals reflect Australia’s long isolation. Australia has an abundance of endemic species—species found nowhere else—which is typical of islands whose isolation by expanses of water prevents species from migrating. Over time, these species diverge evolutionarily into new species that look very different from their ancestors that may exist on the mainland. Australia's marsupials, the Galápagos' finches, and many species on the Hawaiian Islands are all unique to their one point of origin, yet they display distant relationships to ancestral species on mainlands.

Like anatomical structures, the molecular structures of life reflect descent with modification. DNA's universality reflects evidence of a common ancestor for all of life. Fundamental divisions in life between the genetic code, DNA replication, and expression are reflected in major structural differences in otherwise conservative structures such as ribosome components and membrane structures. In general, the relatedness of groups of organisms is reflected in the similarity of their DNA sequences—exactly the pattern that we would expect from descent and diversification from a common ancestor.

DNA sequences have also shed light on some of the mechanisms of evolution. For example, it is clear that the evolution of new functions for proteins commonly occurs after gene duplication events that allow freely modifying one copy by mutation, selection, or drift (changes in a population’s gene pool resulting from chance), while the second copy continues to produce a functional protein.

Although the theory of evolution generated some controversy when Darwin first proposed it, biologists almost universally accepted it, particularly younger biologists, within 20 years after publication of On the Origin of Species. Nevertheless, the theory of evolution is a difficult concept and misconceptions about how it works abound.

Critics of the theory of evolution dismiss its importance by purposefully confounding the everyday usage of the word “theory” with the way scientists use the word. In science, we understand a “theory” to be a body of thoroughly tested and verified explanations for a set of observations of the natural world. Scientists have a theory of the atom, a theory of gravity, and the theory of relativity, each which describes understood facts about the world. In the same way, the theory of evolution describes facts about the living world. As such, a theory in science has survived significant efforts to discredit it by scientists. In contrast, a “theory” in common vernacular is a word meaning a guess or suggested explanation. This meaning is more akin to the scientific concept of “hypothesis.” When critics of evolution say it is “just a theory,” they are implying that there is little evidence supporting it and that it is still in the process of rigorous testing. This is a mischaracterization.

Evolution is the change in a population's genetic composition over time, specifically over generations, resulting from differential reproduction of individuals with certain alleles. Individuals do change over their lifetime, obviously, but this is development and involves changes programmed by the set of genes the individual acquired at birth in coordination with the individual’s environment. When thinking about the evolution of a characteristic, it is probably best to think about the change of the average value of the characteristic in the population over time. For example, when natural selection leads to bill-size change in medium ground finches in the Galápagos, this does not mean that individual bills on the finches are changing. If one measures the average bill size among all individuals in the population at one time and then measures them in the population several years later, this average value will be different as a result of evolution. Although some individuals may survive from the first time to the second, they will still have the same bill size; however, there will be many new individuals who contribute to the shift in average bill size.