define heredity and evolution separately?
Answers
Answer:
Heredity:-
the process by which physical or mental qualities pass from parent to child.
evolution:-
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. ... It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms and molecules.
Answer:
Evolution: A Very Simple Idea
To the British naturalist Charles Darwin goes the credit for coming up with what is arguably simultaneously the most important, most successful, and most controversial theory in the history of science: evolution by natural selection. And yet, as the quote at the top of this article indicates, Darwin's basic insight was very simple. The inspiration for his ideas came from a journey he made aboard the ship HMS Beagle to various locations in and around South America, most notably the Galápagos Islands. Here he observed subtle variations in the characteristics of the species found on different islands. For instance, he saw that the finches (a kind of bird) on each island had beaks with slightly different shapes and sizes to those on all the other islands. He also realised that in each case, the beak was adapted to the main food sources available on that island — where the main source was small seeds, the beaks were smaller, and for larger seeds or nuts the beaks were larger.
Darwin concluded that it was extremely unlikely that all these types of finches, with their high degree of similarity, had arisen (or been created, if one believed in God) independently. A much better explanation was that they had all originally been a single species, which had spread to various islands. Over time, as the population on each island grew via reproduction, it developed variations due to random mutation and crossover events of the type we saw above. However, not all the variants were equally successful: some had characteristics that enabled them to survive better and longer than others, such as beaks better adapted to the available food. Since these survived more, they also reproduced more and gave rise to more offspring with the same characteristics. So, eventually, birds that were best adapted to the conditions came to dominate the population on each island. This, in a nutshell, is the idea of natural selection, also often described as "survival of the fittest".
Darwin's great leap of faith was to the say that the same idea could be used to explain all of the enormous variety of species on the planet: over a sufficiently long time period, all of these could have arisen by the same processess of variation and natural selection, starting from a single common ancestor. Of course, the theory does not say anything about how that common ancestor first came about — it does not solve the problem of the origin of life, which remains one of the great mysteries of science.
Explanation:
heredity
One of the key things we see in the living world all around us is the principle of heredity: the rule that like begets like. A seed from an apple gives rise to another apple tree, not an orange tree or a beanstalk. Children invariably resemble their parents, both in looks and in personality. How does this come about? How does the tiny seed 'know' that it has to grow into an apple tree and not anything else? Clearly, there must be some medium for the transmission of information from plant to seed, or parent to child. The concept of a gene as the basic unit of this medium was first proposed by an Austrian priest who enjoyed experimenting with pea plants in his backyard — Gregor Mendel.
In his most famous experiments, done between 1856–63, Mendel took two different varieties of the plant, a tall one and a short one, and produced offspring by hybridising them (i.e., using pollen from one to fertilise the other). According to the blending inheritance theory popular at that time, the progeny should have been of medium height, intermediate between the characteristics of the parents. However, Mendel found that the progeny in the first generation, known as the F1 (first filial) generation, were always tall. When these hybrids were further interbred, to produce second generation or F2 progeny, the short variety reappeared, but only 1 in 4 (or 25%) of the F2 plants were short and the rest were tall.