Lesson summary for:
A Step in Speciation
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Students compare different subspecies of a California salamander on a grid map of California to focus on patterns of their distribution, their likely evolutionary relationships, and probable sequence of formation from the ancestral salamander.
Two 50-minute periods
Much of the "busy" work can be streamlined to make this an effective activity at the undergraduate student level.
- Evolution is often defined as a change in allele frequencies within a population.
- Natural selection and genetic drift act on the variation that exists in a population.
- Speciation is the splitting of one ancestral lineage into two or more descendent lineages.
- Speciation is often the result of geographic isolation.
- Occupying new environments can provide new selection pressures and new opportunities, leading to speciation.
- A hallmark of science is exposing ideas to testing.
- Scientists can test ideas about events and processes long past, very distant, and not directly observable.
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