Hi Jacob, I was looking through your "track my learning" and I saw your questions on slide 5, so I thought I would answer the first one (I gave Naomi an answer that relates to the second question, so you could check that out). About how they knew about the tree of life, this is mainly because of the work of a very famous scientist called Charles Darwin who, after many years of research, wrote a book in 1859 called "On The Origin of Species". Darwin noticed many of the similarities and differences between different types of animals and came up with the idea of natural selection (also called 'survival of the fittest'). In this case, fittest doesn't necessarily mean how long or fast you can run, it just means how well you fit into your environment. Over millions of years for each species, nature selects just for those animals (or plants) that are best able to survive and pass their genes on to the next generation (similarly humans have selected particular features of dogs, so that is why we have so many different dog breeds, even though they all originated from the wolf). These days, we can now use DNA sequence information to tell us how all the organisms on the tree of life relate to one another, but back in Charles Darwin's day, he just had to rely on observation and clear thinking.
Hi Jacob,
ReplyDeleteI was looking through your "track my learning" and I saw your questions on slide 5, so I thought I would answer the first one (I gave Naomi an answer that relates to the second question, so you could check that out). About how they knew about the tree of life, this is mainly because of the work of a very famous scientist called Charles Darwin who, after many years of research, wrote a book in 1859 called "On The Origin of Species". Darwin noticed many of the similarities and differences between different types of animals and came up with the idea of natural selection (also called 'survival of the fittest'). In this case, fittest doesn't necessarily mean how long or fast you can run, it just means how well you fit into your environment. Over millions of years for each species, nature selects just for those animals (or plants) that are best able to survive and pass their genes on to the next generation (similarly humans have selected particular features of dogs, so that is why we have so many different dog breeds, even though they all originated from the wolf).
These days, we can now use DNA sequence information to tell us how all the organisms on the tree of life relate to one another, but back in Charles Darwin's day, he just had to rely on observation and clear thinking.