Munich (München), Germany

Evolution, Ecology and Systematics

Master's
Language: EnglishStudies in English
Subject area: physical science, environment
Qualification: Master
Kind of studies: full-time studies
University website: www.lmu.de
Ecology
Ecology (from Greek: οἶκος, "house", or "environment"; -λογία, "study of") is the branch of biology which studies the interactions among organisms and their environment. Objects of study include interactions of organisms with each other and with abiotic components of their environment. Topics of interest include the biodiversity, distribution, biomass, and populations of organisms, as well as cooperation and competition within and between species. Ecosystems are dynamically interacting systems of organisms, the communities they make up, and the non-living components of their environment. Ecosystem processes, such as primary production, pedogenesis, nutrient cycling, and niche construction, regulate the flux of energy and matter through an environment. These processes are sustained by organisms with specific life history traits. Biodiversity means the varieties of species, genes, and ecosystems, enhances certain ecosystem services.
Evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules.
Evolution
Organic evolution has its physical analogue in the universal law that the world tends, in all its parts and particles, to pass from certain less probable to certain more probable configurations or states. This is the second law of thermodynamics. It has been called the law of evolution of the world; and we call it, after Clausius, the Principle of Entropy, which is a literal translation of Evolution in Greek.
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (1917)
Ecology
A Healthy Ecology is the Basis for a Healthy Economy
Claudine Schneider, U.S. Representative in The Green Lifestyle Handbook.
Evolution
[While research] … has revealed unexpected, stunning complexity, no progress at all has been made in understanding how that complexity could evolve by unintelligent processes.
Michael Behe, as attributed without citation in Awake! magazine (anonymous), January 2015
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