It's evolutionary, my dear Watson.

I'm lucky enough to have gotten the flu, so I'm going to keep this pretty short because I'm not feeling overly great right now. Today I'm going to set out a definition for evolution that should hopefully carry through the semester. This definition comes adapted from the genetics textbook I used through uni (referenced below). It may not be the best reference for evolution, as the primary focus of the book is molecular genetics, but I felt that the evolutionary sections and definitions were sufficient for something like this blog.

Evolution, in its most basic form, is the progressive changes that occur in the gene pool of a population.


Genes are the functional parts of DNA that code for information about us. They control basic things like our hair or eye colour and height, as well as being the building blocks for all our proteins, hormones and anything else that occurs our the body.

Alleles are the alternate forms of any given gene. For example, say we are looking at cats, and their fur colour is controlled by a single gene. The different alleles of that gene would be the different colours. There may be a black allele and a white allele and an orange allele, but they're still all the same gene.

So evolution occurs when alleles are changed within a population over time through certain mechanisms. There are four of these mechanisms: mutation, migration, natural selection, and genetic drift. I'll explain these in my next post.

Hartl, D. L., & Jones, E. W. (2005). Genetics: analysis of genes and genomes (6th ed.): Jones and Bartlett Publishers.