The idea of evolution was once taboo for its new ideas at the time, it was seen as wrong because it challenged ideas already established about the world, especially how life came to be. Evolution is a relatively new idea discovered by Charles Darwin. This discovery came to be when Darwin was traveling along the Galapagos islands where he studied finches and discovered that these finches had all originated from one species of finch and eventually became differentiated leading the species to split, based on their environment. However evolution doesn’t just occur, it takes centuries or even millennia to take place and it isn’t the species that adapt to the environment, the environment selects those who survive. This means that only species with favored characteristics for that environment would be allowed to survive and produce offspring while those who do not have these favored characteristics would become extinct, dividing these species into more groups. Over time these change in characteristics become so drastic that it is very difficult to compare the two separate species.
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Darwin's theory of evolution was so revolutionary that as time progressed it became more accepted changing the way the world was viewed that it was accepted and became one of the five major core concepts: evolution (I am going to be talking about this).One example of evolution over time is the great diversity of microbes we see today. In terms of biomass, microbes are omnipresent on earth. The massive number of diverse single-cellular organisms and their ubiquity should hint at their importance in Earth’s ecosystem. Not only do microorganisms play a vital role in carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus cycles, but they also perform crucial tasks for humans in food production, fermentation, agriculture, and medicine (Suen, personal communication, October 6, 2015). The same goes for other forms of living beings; such as animals and plants. In humans, there is estimated to be about 1,000 species of bacteria, more than 100 times as many genes found on the entire human genome. This microbiome, the community of microbes that reside on or within an organism, coevolves with humans, as all gut microbiota do with their host species. Any disturbances within the community living in the host’s gut can result in serious health crises, such as diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, encompassing ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. A change in this complex system affects many other systems in the body. Thus, the microbiome is as significant as an organ and functions as such (Guinane and Cotter 2013). One way to find out how closely related animals are is to compare their behaviors and cells present within their bodies, for instance the microbiota. A researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison, Garret Suen, an assistant professor in the bacteriology department, compares the gut microbiota of the two toed and three toed sloth in his study in order to show their differences. The microbiome inside any given animal depends on their diet and lifestyle; sloths, being predominantly folivores (leaf eaters), are no exception. The plant matter, consisting of cellulose and lignin, must be broken down into usable nutrients with the help of microorganisms. Sloths have a very distinct lifestyle and thus a unique digestive process. The rate of food passage through the gut provides information on the efficiency of the microbiota at work. Sloths take upwards of eight days to completely process food in their 55cm bowel tract and excrete it as waste. Kathleen LaMattina, who works with sloths at New York’s Bronx Zoo, describes the three-toed sloths as sluggish creatures that only come down from their trees once a week to defecate. A sloth’s metabolism is the driving force behind this unusual behavior (LaMattina and Sherr 2006). While researching the two and three toed sloth they noticed that during the leaf fermentation process only 0.2-13.4 % of the stomach's content is processed in 24 hours and that the cellulose in the plants digested by protozoans and bacteria in the stomach, that's why the gut is short. They were also able to show that, unlike other mammalian herbivores, sloth gut
Darwin's theory of evolution was so revolutionary that as time progressed it became more accepted changing the way the world was viewed that it was accepted and became one of the five major core concepts: evolution (I am going to be talking about this).One example of evolution over time is the great diversity of microbes we see today. In terms of biomass, microbes are omnipresent on earth. The massive number of diverse single-cellular organisms and their ubiquity should hint at their importance in Earth’s ecosystem. Not only do microorganisms play a vital role in carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus cycles, but they also perform crucial tasks for humans in food production, fermentation, agriculture, and medicine (Suen, personal communication, October 6, 2015). The same goes for other forms of living beings; such as animals and plants. In humans, there is estimated to be about 1,000 species of bacteria, more than 100 times as many genes found on the entire human genome. This microbiome, the community of microbes that reside on or within an organism, coevolves with humans, as all gut microbiota do with their host species. Any disturbances within the community living in the host’s gut can result in serious health crises, such as diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, encompassing ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. A change in this complex system affects many other systems in the body. Thus, the microbiome is as significant as an organ and functions as such (Guinane and Cotter 2013). One way to find out how closely related animals are is to compare their behaviors and cells present within their bodies, for instance the microbiota. A researcher at the University of Wisconsin Madison, Garret Suen, an assistant professor in the bacteriology department, compares the gut microbiota of the two toed and three toed sloth in his study in order to show their differences. The microbiome inside any given animal depends on their diet and lifestyle; sloths, being predominantly folivores (leaf eaters), are no exception. The plant matter, consisting of cellulose and lignin, must be broken down into usable nutrients with the help of microorganisms. Sloths have a very distinct lifestyle and thus a unique digestive process. The rate of food passage through the gut provides information on the efficiency of the microbiota at work. Sloths take upwards of eight days to completely process food in their 55cm bowel tract and excrete it as waste. Kathleen LaMattina, who works with sloths at New York’s Bronx Zoo, describes the three-toed sloths as sluggish creatures that only come down from their trees once a week to defecate. A sloth’s metabolism is the driving force behind this unusual behavior (LaMattina and Sherr 2006). While researching the two and three toed sloth they noticed that during the leaf fermentation process only 0.2-13.4 % of the stomach's content is processed in 24 hours and that the cellulose in the plants digested by protozoans and bacteria in the stomach, that's why the gut is short. They were also able to show that, unlike other mammalian herbivores, sloth gut