Evolution Digital Story
Reflection
In this project a partner and I created a digital story about evolution. It was a profile of what evolution is, how its been studied, examples of micro and macro evolution, and why it has been shown as a valid scientific theory. The first step in creating our video was writing a script. We had to do a lot of research on evolution that could be used in our video script. After writing our script we recorded our voices saying the script, this part was difficult because we would often mess up and have to start over. Once our recording was done we put it into imovie and started putting pictures to our words, this was the hardest part of the project because you had to have a lot of pictures and they all had to line up perfect with what you were saying and make sense. We got our first draft critiqued by a few of our peers and then we made adjustments so we could have a perfect final draft.
Evolution Script
In this project a partner and I created a digital story about evolution. It was a profile of what evolution is, how its been studied, examples of micro and macro evolution, and why it has been shown as a valid scientific theory. The first step in creating our video was writing a script. We had to do a lot of research on evolution that could be used in our video script. After writing our script we recorded our voices saying the script, this part was difficult because we would often mess up and have to start over. Once our recording was done we put it into imovie and started putting pictures to our words, this was the hardest part of the project because you had to have a lot of pictures and they all had to line up perfect with what you were saying and make sense. We got our first draft critiqued by a few of our peers and then we made adjustments so we could have a perfect final draft.
Evolution Script
- Biological evolution, simply put, is descent with modification.
- This definition encompasses small-scale evolution
- changes in gene frequency in a population from one generation to the next
- large-scale evolution
- the descent of different species from a common ancestor over many generations
- Biological evolution is not simply a matter of change over time.
- Lots of things change over time: trees lose their leaves, mountain ranges rise and erode, but they aren't examples of biological evolution because they don't involve descent through genetic inheritance.
- The central idea of biological evolution is that all life on Earth shares a common ancestor
- The very first viable species on earth evolved into everything we see today. We know this for a fact because of the evidence in fossils
- Evolution means that we're all distant cousins: humans and oak trees, hummingbirds and whales.
- different species share common ancestors.
- The process of evolution produces a pattern of relationships between species.
- we can reconstruct evolutionary relationships and represent them on a "family tree," called a phylogeny.
- It illustrates the idea that all of life is related and can be divided into three major clades, often referred to as the three domains: Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryota
- Understanding a phylogeny is a lot like reading a family tree. The root of the tree represents the ancestral lineage, and the tips of the branches represent the descendants of that ancestor. As you move from the root to the tips, you are moving forward in time.
- Life began 3.8 billion years ago, and insects diversified 290 million years ago, but the human and chimpanzee lineages diverged only five million years ago.
- There is controversy between creationism and evolution. Creationism, which is backed by certain religions, believes that a single being created the first man and woman, whereas evolution states that humans evolved with apes from a common ancestor over the years.
- Charles Darwin was the first to formulate a scientific argument for the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Evolution by natural selection is a process inferred from three facts about populations:
- 1) more offspring are produced than can possibly survive,
- 2) traits vary among individuals, leading to different rates of survival and reproduction
- 3) trait differences are heritable.
- In the early 20th century, genetics was integrated with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection through the discipline of population genetics.
- Evolution in organisms occurs through changes in heritable traits – particular characteristics of an organism.
- In humans, for example, eye colour is an inherited characteristic and an individual might inherit the "brown-eye trait" from one of their parents.
- Inherited traits are controlled by genes and the complete set of genes within an organism's genome is called its genotype.
- Recent findings have confirmed important examples of heritable changes that cannot be explained by changes to the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA.