Evolutionary biology  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

As "Darwinism" became widely accepted in the 1870s, good-natured caricatures of him with an ape or monkey body symbolised evolution.

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Evolutionary biology is a sub-field of biology concerned with the origin and descent of species, as well as their change, multiplication, and diversity over time. One who studies evolutionary biology is known as an evolutionary biologist.

Evolutionary biology is an interdisciplinary field because it includes scientists from a wide range of both field and lab oriented disciplines. For example, it generally includes scientists who may have a specialist training in particular organisms such as mammalogy, ornithology, or herpetology, but use those organisms as case studies to answer general questions in evolution. It also generally includes paleontologists and geologists who use fossils to answer questions about the tempo and mode of evolution, as well as theoreticians in areas such as population genetics and evolutionary psychology. In the 1990s developmental biology made a re-entry into evolutionary biology from its initial exclusion from the modern synthesis through the study of evolutionary developmental biology.

Its findings feed strongly into new disciplines that study mankind's sociocultural evolution and evolutionary behavior. Evolutionary biology's frameworks of ideas and conceptual tools are now finding application in the study of a range of subjects from computing to nanotechnology.

Artificial life is a sub-field of Bioinformatics that attempts to model, or even recreate, the evolution of organisms as described by evolutionary biology. Usually this is done through mathematics and computer models.

See also

• Artificial selection
• Computational phylogenetics
• Evolution of dietary antioxidants
• Evolutionary ecology
• Evolutionary physiology
• Evolutionary tree
• Experimental evolution
• Genetics
• Paleontology
• Phylogenetic comparative methods
• Phylogenetics
• Quantitative genetics
• Selective breeding
• Sexual selection
• Systematics

See also

• Abiogenesis
• Creation–evolution controversy
• Evidence of common descent
• Evolution as fact and theory
• Level of support for evolution
• Misconceptions about evolution