Evolution Is The Human Body Plan Essay

Evolution Is The Human Body Plan Essay

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Evolution is the driving force behind the variety of life we see today on this planet, as well as the remnants of life seen in fossil records, pushing the bounds of complexity and, through selection processes, creating countless new forms of life (Adami et al., 2000) all the while relying on two processes, diversification and extinction (Futuyama, 2004). Currently, between 10-14 million extant species are thought to live on Earth, yet this amounts to only around 1% of all species though to have arisen (Miller et al., 2012). All life forms found on Earth are all directly descended from one universal ancestor, the original life form which lived around 3.8 billion years ago, and any species since have arisen through descent with modification from this simple organism (Glansdorf et al., 2008). In this essay, I will evaluate whether or not evolution is deterministic and whether the human body plan was destined to evolve as it did when it did. I will also test the assertion by Stephen Jay Gould that if the “tape of life” were to be rewound, then evolution would have taken a vastly different pathway, leading to a very different array of species populating the planet. This is a stochastic mode of evolution, where an ideal body plan does not exist for evolution to ultimately always drive towards, and that the biodiversity seen currently exists merely through chance. To decide whether evolution is stochastic or deterministic, I will use examples from nature where distantly related organisms have developed shared characteristics, and also examine ways in which evolution is not a perfect process.

Throughout all of the Linnaean kingdoms, there is a vast library of striking similarities found between species which are only distantly related ...

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... skies come from the Wing-Assisted Incline Running Hypothesis. The Wing-Assisted Incline Running hypothesis is an adaptation of the cursorial model, which suggests that flight came from the gradual improvement forelimbs to aid of small jumps, which over time developed into full blown flight, and instead predicts that the use of forelimb propulsion to help the terrestrial dinosaur run up steep inclines gradually led to the development and strengthening of the forelimbs, to create wing like structures which facilitated flight (Nudds et al., 2009). Gradually, the pentadactyl bone system has been lost over time, being scaled down to just three bones, which anchor the primary flight feathers, while the humerus, radius and ulna provide the main structure to the wing (Vazquez, 1994), unlike bats and pterosaurs where a lot of the membrane support comes from elongated finger.

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