Bologna, Italy

Biodiversity and Evolution

Biodiversità ed evoluzione

Master's
Language: ItalianStudies in Italian
Subject area: biology
University website: www.unibo.it
Biodiversity
Biodiversity, a portmanteau of biological (life) and diversity, generally refers to the variety and variability of life on Earth. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), biodiversity typically measures variation at the genetic, the species, and the ecosystem level. Terrestrial biodiversity tends to be greater near the equator, which seems to be the result of the warm climate and high primary productivity. Biodiversity is not distributed evenly on Earth, and is richest in the tropics. These tropical forest ecosystems cover less than 10 percent of earth's surface, and contain about 90 percent of the world's species. Marine biodiversity tends to be highest along coasts in the Western Pacific, where sea surface temperature is highest, and in the mid-latitudinal band in all oceans. There are latitudinal gradients in species diversity. Biodiversity generally tends to cluster in hotspots, and has been increasing through time, but will be likely to slow in the future.
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
When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it is for that reason that I speak of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better — ever so much slightly better — at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.
Jonas Salk, in "Jonas Salk, "A Wise and Good Ancestor" interview with Richard D. Heffner on The Open Mind (11 May 1985)
Evolution
I do not believe in evolution … and none of your professors believe in evolution. … Beliefs are opinions.
Eugenie C. Scott, "The Evolution of Creationism," address at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio (1 May 2007)
Evolution
Aristotle especially, both by speculation and observation... reached something like the modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature. With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view remained...
Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, Ch.1 (1896)
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