Evidence for

Evolution
Reading: Freeman, Chapter 23, 26

The Fact of Evolution

Evolution-the progressive change of organisms as they
descend from ancestral species-is a fact. By now, the
evidence for it is overwhelming and ubiquitous.
It is of such obvious clinical significance in medicine that to deny it
is irresponsible.
That said, any explanation for its existence and mode of action is a
scientific theory, which must be testable and, in theory, falsifiable.
Darwins theory of natural selection, combined with other
mechanisms of evolution discovered since Darwin, form what is
known as the modern synthesis, the current scientific paradigm
in the biological sciences.
It provides a central explanation for phenomena in such diverse fields as
paleontology and developmental biology, medicine and psychology.

 The existence of evolution has been proposed several times

in history. For instance, the ancient Greek scientist,
Animaxander, proposed a theory of evolution.
In terms of modern science, it was first advanced proposed
in the late 1700s and early 1800s by several scientists
including Compte de Buffon and Erasmus Darwin.
The idea of evolution remained controversial for a long time,
partially because it ran contrary to contemporary religious
ideas and partially because no mechanism for evolution was
known.
Darwin and Wallaces theory of evolution by natural selection
was the first plausible, widely-accepted mechanism for
evolutionary change.
By now it is well-tested, supported by hundreds of
independent scientific investigations.
It is also falsifiable-aspects of Darwins theory of evolution
have been successfully challenged, others supported. This
is the case for the other mechanisms of evolution as well.

Examples of the clinical significance of

evolutionary biology to medicine

HIV. HIV is a retrovirus of enormous medical concern.

Because of evolutionary studies, we know that two separate
lineages of this retrovirus passed into the human population
from African Apes in the mid 20th century.
This knowledge has alerted us to the danger of emergent
diseases from other animal hosts, a reason for our concern
about SARS and bird flu.
In addition, it is an understanding of evolutionary biology
that has enabled us to develop a therapy for HIV.
The so-called triple therapy HIV treatment is an example
of evolutionary medicine.
A single drug will not work against the disease because the virus
evolves so quickly, it attains resistance to every drug we have within
a few months.
By using three drugs simultaneously, we subvert the evolution of the
virusevolving resistance to one drug means loosing resistance to
another.

Antibiotic resistance is an evolutionary phenomenon

of tremendous clinical significance.
Early in the 20th century, a variety of antibiotics, used
to treat bacterial diseases, were developed.
An understanding of evolution is helpful to understand
where these antibiotics come from to begin withmany,
such as penicillin, were evolved by fungi, over millions of
years, to kill off their bacterial competitors.
Humans have co-opted them for our own purposes.

Since the 20th century, the bacterial pathogens have

evolved resistance to our antibiotics, because
extensive use of these drugs has caused very strong
natural selection in favor of mutations which favor
antibiotic resistance.
For instance, various strains of Neisseria gonorrheae have
evolved resistance to penicillins, tetracyclines,
spectinomycin and floroquinolones.

Natural Selection as the Mechanism of Evolution:

Scientific understanding of evolution came out of its infancy in
1859, when theories of evolution by natural selection by
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace became widely
known.
We now know of other mechanisms of evolution, including
genetic drift and mutation, but natural selection is the only
mechanism capable of producing adaptation.
Natural Selection was not immediately accepted-it took until
the1930s for Darwins ideas to be synthesized with a modern
understanding of genetics for widespread acceptance.

Intellectual stepping-stones to
developing a theory of evolution

Linnaeus and Taxonomy

Malthus and the Principle of Population
Lyell and Uniformitarianism
Lamarck and the fist comprehensive
theory of evolution
The Voyage of the Beagle
Wallace and Darwin

Linneus and Taxonomy

Carolus Linnaeus was a sixteenth-century Swedish

physician and Botanist.
He founded the science of taxonomy, the branch of
biology concerned with naming and classifying living
things.
He developed the two part system of binomial
nomenclature we use today.
His genera were clustered into increasingly broader
categories; families, classes, phyla, and kingdoms
although he did not believe in evolution by descent, this
pattern does provide a framework for thinking about
evolution from a common ancestor.

Malthus

Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth

century economist, published An
Essay on the Principle of
Population in 1798.
This document had profound
implications.
Simply stated: people tend to have more children
than can possibly survive, and human populations
have historically been kept in check by famine,
starvation, and disease.
Darwin read this essay and was strongly
influenced: he noted that every species has more
offspring than can be expected to survive.

How Old is the Earth?

From a scientific standpoint, the age of the Earth was

essentially unknown until the 19th century.
Early ideas varied greatly, some cultures, such as
classical Hindu society, thought of the Earth as incredibly
old.
Christian theology limited the age of the Earth to a few
thousand years, because of the biblical account of
creation as lasting seven days, and the geneologies
included in the book of numbers..
Based upon the old testament, the Archbishop James
Usher calculated that God created the Earth in 4004BC.
This left little time for incredibly slow, gradual processes
like evolution...

Hutton, Lyell and Uniformitarianism

The English geologist, James Hutton

proposed that it was possible to explain
geological land formations by processes
that are currently in operation, such as
erosion and sedimentation.
Canyons were cut by the erosion of
streams, layers of sediment were deposited
at the edge of river deltas, these processes
occurred slowly over a very long time-this
idea was called gradualism.

The English geologist, Charles Lyell was a

contemporary of Darwins.
He was a proponent of Hutton, and went a bit farther,
embracing the principal uniformitarianism-the idea that
geological processes in operation now operated similarly
in the past, at about the same rate.

The Uniformitarian view of

nature, requires vast
amounts of time to explain
the present state of the
Earth.

Jean
Baptiste
Lamarck
Jean Baptiste de Lamark developed the first

comprehensive model of evolution.

Lamarck was a French Zoologist, curator of the
invertebrate collection at the Paris museum.
Lamarck saw many different lines of descent
among the fossil invertebrates he encountered:
instead of Aristotles single scala natura, there
were many.
He proposed that organisms increased in
complexity through time because of an innate
tendency.

Lamarck proposed that interactions of

organisms and environment drove the
process of evolution.
He followed the widely accepted notion that
characteristics acquired during an individuals
lifetime could be passed to ones offspring.
He proposed that patterns of use and disuse
drove the evolution of adaptations. In
stretching their necks to reach leaves high in
the treetop, giraffes acquired slightly longer
necks, and passed these longer necks to
their offspring.

According to Lamarck, every organism was

continually striving for greater complexity, a clam
strove to be a better clam, etc.
Lamarckian evolution can be disproved by
experiment, specifically, we now know that
acquired characters cannot be passed to
offspring, also, evolution carries no innate
tendency toward increasing complexity, but
Lamarcks theory was an important prelude to
Darwins, it opened the door to thinking that
organisms can and do change over the course of
time.

The Voyage of the Beagle

Much of Charles Darwins inspiration for his theory of

evolution by natural selection came from his voyage on
the HMS Beagle, in 1831.
He saw an incredible diversity of species, with
adaptations to a wide variety of environments; Brazilian
rainforests, Chilean deserts, oceanic islands, etc.
The Galapagos islands particularly impressed him;
most of the species there live nowhere else in the
world, yet their closest living relative is on the mainland
a few hundred miles away.
He was to spend the next 27 years developing a theory
to explain what he saw.

Darwin
and
Wallace
Alfred Russell Wallace, a nineteenth century naturalist

and explorer, an expert on collecting specimens for resale

in Europe, developed essentially the same theory of
evolution by natural selection as Darwin.
An active man, he sat down to write it recovering from a
bout of malaria, when he was unable to go out and
explore.
The two shared credit for the discovery, a rare example of
diplomacy in 19th century science.
Darwin is better known today, because he amassed a
considerable amount of evidence to support his ideas.
Wallaces arguments were more intuitive and contained a
less-extensive battery of examples.

Darwin had spent much of his life amassing the evidence he

needed to support his model of evolution.
He was finally goaded into publishing when he came across a manuscript
by Wallace which contained many of the same ideas.

Both theories had very broad implications, forcing European

intellectuals to re-examine their place in nature.
By proposing a mechanism for the evolution of the human species, its
mind, and its achievements, that is not supernatural, it removed the need
for a divine prime mover from science.
Such a creator, or prime mover had been an element of Western science, since
Roman times or earlier, and had been removed from physics and astronomy
centuries earlier.

1859: The Origin of Species

Darwins manuscript contained several new

ideas, ideas not found in earlier notions of
evolution;
All species evolved from earlier species.
The mechanism is natural selection; members of
a species possessing more desirable traits will
have more offspring and survive to reproductive
maturity.
Evolution occurs over a very long span of time.

The Origin of Species makes this argument, structured

logically
All organisms produce more offspring than can possibly
survive
All organisms vary for a wide variety of different attributes
and features-they also vary in reproductive success: some
have more offspring than others.
Some variation is heritable.
Some of this variation must influence reproductive success
Given that the above are truedesirable characteristics will
thus be preferentially passed to offspring
This is a logical conclusion of the first four points

Darwin concluded, based upon intuitive grounds, that, over vast

spans of time, present day species have descended from a
common ancestor. The book contained no mechanism for
speciation, however.

Evidence for Evolution

The gradual evolution of life on the planet, and

their descent from a common ancestor, is a fact.
Darwins theory of evolution is a comprehensive body
of evolution that attempts to explain how this occurred.

One of the hallmarks of a truly revolutionary

scientific theory is that it brings together many
previously unexplained patterns under a single
body of theory.
Like Newtons theory of universal gravitation, Darwins
theory of evolution created a new scientific paradigm.

Some of the original evidence for

evolution:

Embryology
Vestigial and Homologous structures
Biogeography
The Fossil Record

Embryology

Closely related species go through similar stages of

development, although the adults may not resemble
each other very closely.
For instance, all vertebrate embryos develop gill
pouches at some stage, even though in many species,
they are lost later. This is suggestive of a common
origin for vertebrates.
Embryological development is often suggestive of
evolution: birds have many developmental features in
common with reptilian ancestors, land vertebrate
embryos have many features suggestive of an aquatic
existence (gill pouches, a notochord, blocks of
segmented muscle).

Snake Chicken

Possum

Cat

Bat

Human

Vestigial Structures
Many species retain structures that only make sense in
light of their ancestry.
These structures are typically reduced and nonfunctional,
but they are inherited from ancestors, in whom they were
important to survival or reproduction

Comparative Development and Embryology

If members of a taxonomic unit share a

common ancestry, it is reflected in their
development:
Two of the many examples:
limb bud development in whales
extraembryonic membranes of the amniote egg

Homologous Structures

Closely related species frequently have

homologous structures: structures that are similar
in their fundamental layout and construction,
although they may serve very different purposes.
For example, the forelimbs of mammals are
constructed from the same skeletal elements:
The wings of a bat, a whale, a human, a dog,
etc. all contain the same bones, despite their
different uses.
This suggests that common ancestry, rather than
design, plays a role in the construction of species.

The
Fossil
Record
The succession of forms in the fossil record clearly
suggests that organisms change through time, and
have descended from a common ancestor.
Different groups appear in the fossil record at
different times, with a general trend toward the
simplest organisms appearing the earliest..this is
at odds with the view that they were all created at
the same time.
Many forms have gone extinct, another
observation that is at odds with the view that each
species was specially created for a purpose.

In some cases, a direct line of descent, and change

through time, can be observed in fossils. Foraminifera,
small oceanic protozoans, leave a continuous fossil record
in oceanic sediments. It is possible to trace their gradual
evolution over millions of years.

Since Darwins day, our knowledge fossil record has

improved tremendously, we can trace the evolution of
many different groups through fossils: horses, for instance,
have a superb fossil record, showing many instances of
speciation and many intervals of evolutionary change.

Example-Whales have
an excellent fossil record-showing
transitional forms

Biogeography

The distribution of living plants and animals suggests

that organisms adapted to one environment can
invade a new environment, and develop specific
adaptations to the new conditions. On the HMS
Beagle, Darwin noted that in South America,
temperate species tended to resemble their South
American tropical relatives, rather than temperate
species in Europe. On the Galapagos, most species
had a recognizable ancestor from the coast of
Ecuador, but species there had numerous adaptations
specific to the climate of the Islands.
Wallace observed the same pattern in many different
parts of the world.

Modern Evidence

Since Darwins time, there have been

hundreds of studies of evolution.
Natural selection has been measured in
many organisms in the field, and in
laboratory populations.
An understanding of evolution has also
become important to combating disease.

Example-DDT resistance in
mosquitoes

The misuse of DDT, and the reemergence of malaria as an important

human pathogen, is perhaps one of the
greatest public health failures of the
century
it could possibly have been prevented if the
evolution of mosquitoes had been taken
into account

In nonresistant insects, DDT is a very effective

insecticide-causing massive mortality and very
strong selective pressure in favor of any
mutation that might lead to resistance

Indiscriminate spraying (when there was no

particular need to control the organism) led to
the rapid evolution of pesticide resistance. Five
Anopheles species were resistant by 1956 and
38 by 1968.

Resistance takes many forms-some of this genetic

variation was probably present in the mosquito
population before the use of DDT, but in the absence
of DDT, these variants are selected against.

1) Chemical adaptation: enzymes evolve that break

down the pesticide.

2) Behavioral adaptation: They evolved to move from

inner, sprayed walls to outer, unsprayed walls. They
evolved sensitivity and avoid the pesticide.

These data are from Bangkok-the R allele is resistant,

the + allele is not.
Note that the + allele becomes more common in the
absence of DDT spraying

Adaptation

Natural Selection as the mechanism for

adaptation was Darwins most important
contribution.
There are other forces of evolution (most of
which were discovered after Darwin), but
natural selection is the only evolutionary
mechanism that can produce adaptation.
Some examples of adaptation are very
impressive.

Find the mantis in this picture

The Variation Problem

For Natural Selection to be effective, there must

be genetic variation upon which selection acts.
Darwin discussed the origin of variations
extensively in On the Origin of Species.., but
he did not know how variation persists.
Although he was a contemporary of Mendels,
Darwin did not know Mendelian genetics (his
work was not well understood at the time).
The current theory of genetics, blending
inheritance, suggested that useful adaptations
would blend into the population and become
diluted.

The synthesis of Darwins theory with Mendelian

genetics led to our modern understanding of Evolution.
Several early twentieth century evolutionary biologists
are widely credited with developing our modern
understanding:
R.A. Fisher
J.B.S. Haldane
Sewall Wright
Theodosius Dobzhanski
Thomas Hunt Morgan