Why evolution is so uncertain?

1. Dr Deepak Rawal (SET, NET, PhD)
Assistant Professor (Zoology)
Mohanlal Sukhadia University Udaipur
India
Uncertainty of Organic Evolution !

2. What actually is evolution?
• Every individual is somewhat different from another individual
• Every progeny is somewhat different from their parents

3. Theories of evolution
• Lamarck “inheritance of acquired characters”
• Darwin “descent with modification”
• De Vries “heritable change in organism is by chance mutation”

4. Why evolution is so complicated?
• It works at population level
• It works at individual level
• It works at organ level

5. What is environment?
It’s just not a physical thing!
•Habitat
•Niche
•Climate
•Diet
•Predator
•Prey
•Habit
•Diseases etc

6. What is adaptation?
Its your luck!
• May be significant
• May be harmful
• May be redundant

7. Tangling of environment and adaptation!
• New environment may leads to new adaptation: Divergent
evolution
• New adaptations leads to new environment: Convergent
evolution
• New environment may leads to new environment
• New adaptation may leads to new adaptation

8. Dilemma of evolution!
• Vampire bats (Desmodus): Why narrow esophageal lumen?
A Vampire bat feeding on a Pig. By Sandstein - Own work, CC BY 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10384428

9. Uncertainty in evolution
•What would happen to monophagous silkworm (Bombyx
mori), if all mulberry (Morus) trees vanish suddenly?
• You can’t precisely predict it.
•If you want to give tail to a
tailless animals by CRISPR you just
can’t do it because you are missing
Its preceding adaptations and
environments.
Silkworm feeding on Mulberry leaves. By
www.shutterstock.com

10. Web of evolution

11. So that’s why evolution is uncertain!
• It is a complicated tangling of environments and adaptations
• We are always looking evolution at its mid point. There is no start point nor
end point in evolution.
• It is multidirectional, dynamic and complex like a unorganized web
• It depends on available options of environments and adaptations

12. Thanks