The article, Introduction to Evolutionary Biology, gives us brief examples of what is evolution, the misconception ideas of evolution, and the expansion of evolution throughout our history. The writer, Chris Colby, introduces to the readers how evolution is misunderstood from people who are interested in science. The writer in the article mentions that evolution is a change in the gene pool of a population over time. He explains what gene and gene pool in the passage. He states, "A gene is a heredity unit that a can be passed on unaltered for many generations. The gene pool is the set of all genes in a species or population." To support his statement of how he defines gene and gene pool, Colby gives us an example of evolution on the English moth, Biston betularia. He explains the observation made from 1848 to 1898 of how the butterflies evolve from a light color to a dark color. .
He introduces in one topic how people have common misconceptions about evolution. He states in his article how evolution can occur without morphological change and morphological change can occur without evolution. He is trying to explain in the article that change in the climate and in the environment are not dependent to evolution. It is not possible for the climate change to be inheritable. The changes in the environment cannot pass on in an offspring. .
One requirement that evolution required is genetic variation. Genetic variation is a diversity in gene frequencies. Mutation is the main source of genetic variation. He gives the readers an example of how genetic variation works. Genetic variation consist of two components which are allelic diversity and non-random associations of alleles. An allele is one or two more different forms of a gene that arise by mutation and found at the same location on a chromosome. One allele may code for brown eyes and the other allele will code for blue eyes. This will cause a mutation since brown eyes is a dominant eye color type.
