Summary on evolution
Topic: Evolution
by Zihao, 2018 Cohort
Note: This entry was created in 2018, when the task was to “summarise a key reading”, and so may not represent a good example to model current primer entries on.
Evolution is a widely using word appearing in almost every field. The key to understand “evolution” is to acknowledge changes through time. Through time, new species formed and some species extinct; many truth humans once believed were proved wrong and what we know as “science” nowadays may be refuted as well in the future. The topic “evolution” is absolutely a complexity in this perspective but don’t worry, let’s start with a common phenomenon.
In kindergarten, there is an experiment on the evolution of kids’ interest (Yaneer Bar-Yam ). Initially, some of the kids like Pokemon and some others like Beanie Babies. They sit in a circle and free to talk with other kids. A few minutes later, a kid change his interest from Pokemon to Beanie Babies because neither of his neighbour like to play Pokmon. It’s reasonable that no one enjoys playing a card game alone. If none of your friends play the same game with you, you’d probably doubt yourself whether you choose a good game at all. In the kids’ circle, if any one of the kid’s neighbour shared the same interest with him, they will satisfy with the initial choice and are likely to not change their mind. Following this rule, we can obtain a stable condition that everyone satisfied with the game they choose and the final choice in general is usually different with the initial one. Children changed their mind considering many external impacts through time, which is a behaviour of evolution.
This phenomenon not only happens with children but also adults. If we tell people there is a fire alarm then some of them would feel panic and others were calm. Observed from the experiment, a panicky person surrounded by more than four non-panicky people would calm down a few moments after. However, he wouldn’t calm down if the number of non- panicky people was three or fewer. We plot their emotions using white dot to illustrate non- panicky people and black dot to illustrate panicky people, and all those dots randomly distributed on the graph at first. We captured picture with some steps of time and can clearly see that bigger white or black circulars were formed rather than scattered dots as we started. This a behaviour of evolution again and what we can draw from these two experiments is that evolution usually happens with communication with
Not only human being or animals, evolution even happen to cells with their ability of communication. Take the patterns on animals’ fur as an instance. As we can see on a tiger or a zebra, the spots or stripes are much larger than the size of a singular biological cell. If those darker cells scattered randomly the fur colour of these animals should be grey rather than have patterns. It’s proved that dark cells can “communicate” with other cells by diffuse some chemicals, which result in two influences called activating and inhibiting. After a certain time, cells will form circular spot on animal’s fur naturally with the interactions between cells. Similar to the macro world, cells will evolve during time passing and the evolution is influenced by others, no matter how simple the interaction is.
It’s still hard to give a definition of “evolution” now but after showing these discoveries, everyone could have an impression him or herself of what “evolution” can indicate and I believe that definitions from you will be centered on “changing by interaction over time”.
Disclaimer#
This content has been contributed by a student as part of a learning activity.
If there are inaccuracies, or opportunities for significant improvement on this topic, feedback is welcome on how to improve the resource.
You can improve articles on this topic as a student in "Unravelling Complexity", or by including the amendments in an email to: Chris.Browne@anu.edu.au