Georgia K

  Looking back at this past year, I wouldn’t consider it a lost year as Times Magazine had put it. I would admit that the beginning of the year was hectic and often at times I did feel lost and isolated. When the pandemic first hit, I was living in my sorority house, constantly surrounded by love and support, and often chaos. When were asked to return home in March, I was devastated. I went back home, in the middle of southwest Kansas, far from all my friends. My family had taken Covid very seriously, as I believe everyone should have, and very much participated in social distancing all summer. At first it was difficult, but then I started to see this time as an opportunity for self-growth. I decided to take several online classes through Kansas State and focused on those religiously. This also gave me the time to really reflect on my career path and what my goals were for myself and my future. Pursuing a career in the dental field, I looked into many graduate schools and formulate...

  In this week’s module, we learned about sexual selection. I always wondered the reason why, across the animal kingdom, males and females in the same species can sometime look drastically different from each other. There are very unique aspects between the two, and most often males would possess external traits that are far more colorful and extravagant than the female. This is a process called sexual dimorphism, which is generally triggered by the process of sexual selection through competitive mating (Leary, 2020). This can manifest in many ways such as color, size, behavior, feathers, antlers, and more. One of the well-known displays of dimorphism is the peacock. The male peacock usually has a large fan of iridescent blue and green, while the female has shorter feathers of brown or gray. Dimorphism was first proposed in 1996 by an English geneticist named Angus John Bateman. The Bateman’s principle is summed up to be that in that most species, variability in reproductive succes...

  It is said that selection is often assumed to eliminate genetic variation. The question is asked, why is genetic variation then not eroded over time? Genetic variation is a measure of the variation that exists in the genetic makeup of individuals withing a population. We know genetic variation still displays in organisms because of the diversity in phenotypes. It is an important force in evolution and allows selection to increase or decrease allele frequency. Throughout the year, we have seen many diverse mechanisms that can explain why genetic variation is maintained in populations, instead of being eroded overtime from selection.   Mutations are constantly appearing due to many factors in our everyday lives. Selection does aim to get rid of these mutations, they still arise through environmental factors, DNA replication, and so much more. As we learned in class this year, some mutations can occur in an organism that could potentially be beneficial for fitness, and eventual...

  A theory first put forward by M. Kimura in 1969, called Neutral theory, provided a conceptual framework for developing methods that detect the action of selection within a species genome. This method proposed at a molecular level, most evolutionary changes within a species are not caused by natural selection. Instead, it happens with random genetic drift, mutation, and is not selected for. This means that everything is random, and these drifts and mutations that are introduced will be randomly fixed as well. “For example, one strong prediction of the neutral theory is that at selectively neutral sites, the rate of substitution is equal to the rate of mutation,” (Duret, 2008). After researching more about Kimura’s theory, he “compares the amino acid sequence of hemoglobin a and cytochrome c in several mammalian species and found that the number of mutant substitutions was too large to be tolerable within Haldane’s theory of natural selection if the substitution number was extrapol...