When evolution goes wrong
Evolution is the process behind the amazing variety of life on Earth. From slime moulds to blue whales, and dinosaurs to humans, the living world is filled with a staggering variety of form, colour, function and habit.
And all this comes from a pretty simple recipe. The first ingredient is that living things must display diversity, or variation. Genetic mutations, caused by a variety of factors like natural radiation or errors in copying DNA, give evolution plenty to work with. Secondly, these variations must be heritable: that is, parents must be able to pass the variation on to their children. And finally, you need environments that are favourable to certain variations and not to others: selection. With these in place, evolution is unstoppable! It will endlessly produce even more variety in the form of new species, genera, families and even kingdoms.
But sometimes things get tricky. Evolution can come to a standstill, set traps, come to dead-ends or even stop altogether. STEPHEN FLEISCHFRESSER presents the Top 6 ways evolution can go wrong.