Week 10

This week in lab we learned about the drivers for evolution. Some of these drivers include natural selection, gene drift, and migration. Natural selection is when organisms with more favorable traits are more likely to survive and produce offspring. This is also recognized to be the survival of the fittest. Genetic drift refers to the random fluctuations in the frequency of alleles within a population due to chance events. Lastly, migration is when animals migrate to a different area usually because of seasonal change in temperature and precipitation.
The activity we completed was using a fork, spoon, and a popsicle stick to collect beans and place them into our cups. The goal was to demonstrate the process of adaptation and selection. This made sense to me, but something that confused me was when the popsicle stick struggled we evolved to a spoon. This confused me because the spoon was the one that received the most beans so I was curious how it went from worst to best and skipped the fork step in the middle. 
One thing I am still curious and wonder more about is the evolution-fossils. How do scientists know these animals are related if they have evolved so much? 


 

Comments

  1. Macy EngelmannApril 3, 2025 at 1:27 PM

    HI Taylor, I agree that it is a little confusing how we were able to adapt straight from a popsicle stick to a spoon. I wonder if in the real world mutations can skip steps or do they have to go through each one!

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  2. Elise WareApril 6, 2025 at 6:32 PM

    Hi, Taylor! I also found this experiment to be a little confusing. I was confused about what we were looking at during this experiment. Along with that, trying to figure out how to write the data down was troubling. I hope we can learn more about the purpose of the experiment later!

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