What is Evolutionary Biology?
Evolutionary biology is the discipline that describes the history of life and investigates the processes that account for this history. Evolutionary biology has two encompassing goals: To discover the history of life on earth: that is, (1) to determine the ancestor-descendant relationships among all species that have ever livedtheir phylogeny; (2) to determine the times at which they originated and became extinct; and (3) to determine the origin of and the rate and course of change in their characteristics. To understand the causal processes of evolution: that is, to understand (1) the origins of hereditary variations; (2) how various processes act to affect the fate of those variations; (3) the relative importance of the many co-acting processes of change; (4) how rapidly changes occur; (5) how processes such as mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift have given rise to the diverse molecular, anatomical, behavioral, and other characteristics of different organisms; and (6) how
Simply put, evolutionary biology is the study of how living things have changed over time. Evolutionary biologists look at variation within and between species and try to figure out how and why it came about. Take shrimp, for example. Deep-sea shrimp look basically like most other shrimp except for one rather obvious difference. Deep-sea shrimp have no eyestalks, and therefore no eyes. Why? How did this variation between shrimp species come about? Is this an adaptation to unique environmental conditions? Was it living in the darkness of the deep-sea that allowed these shrimp to “lose” their eyestalk (i.e., through mutation and selection), because it was no longer needed? Perhaps it’s the other way around: maybe all shrimp were eyeless until shallow-water shrimp, adapting to light in the water, slowly over generations developed eyestalks and eyes? By the way, deep-sea shrimp are not exactly ‘eyeless’ – they actually have a photoreceptor on their back and appear to be able to detect infr
Evolutionary biology is an integral part of biology in general — the study and theory of evolution in organisms. More than just a subfield, one might view evolutionary biology as the lens through which all of biology should be viewed, creationists notwithstanding. Evolutionary biology concerns itself with the origin of species through genetic variation and natural selection as well as the shared descent of species from common ancestors. A student of evolutionary biology is an evolutionary biologist. Though biology informed by Darwinian theory dates back to Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, modern evolutionary biology only emerged from the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s, and it wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s that universities began to create departments with the term “evolutionary biology” as part of their titles. The tremendous amount of fossil knowledge uncovered in the early and mid 20th century made it possible to easily trace the evo
