Lesson summary for:
Species, speciation and the environment
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Overview:
Niles Eldredge gives a historical overview of scientists' thinking on the process of speciation, along with modern perspectives on this issue.
This article appears at ActionBioscience.org.Author/Source:
ActionBioscience.org Grade level:
9-12 Time:
30 minutes Teaching tips:
This article is very advanced and may be appropriate for AP biology. Student learning on this topic may be enhanced by supporting resources and classroom discussion. Concepts: - Biological evolution accounts for diversity over long periods of time.
- Present-day species evolved from earlier species; the relatedness of organisms is the result of common ancestry.
- Geological change and biological evolution are linked.
- Tectonic plate movement has affected the evolution and distribution of living things.
- Rates of extinction vary.
- Speciation is the splitting of one ancestral lineage into two or more descendent lineages.
- Speciation requires reproductive isolation.
- Occupying new environments can provide new selection pressures and new opportunities, leading to speciation.
- Scientists can test ideas about events and processes long past, very distant, and not directly observable.
- Scientific knowledge is open to question and revision as we come up with new ideas and discover new evidence.
- Accepted scientific theories are not tenuous; they must survive rigorous testing and be supported by multiple lines of evidence to be accepted.
- Rates of evolution vary.
- Rates of speciation vary.
- Speciation is often the result of geographic isolation.
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