Evolution Episode III: Harder, Faster, Better, Stronger

Depending on who you're talking to, fitness can mean a plethora of things. Before thinking more about evolution, I thought fitness would be to make the species "better". From that stand point, one could ask, "what is better?"; so my definition had to be altered.

My definition for evolutionary fitness would be the ability to survive and pass on heritable traits through reproduction.

Although this definition seems straight forward, the measurement of this process is far from such. If I were to measure fitness in a natural population, I would approach it by counting the survival of offspring and the correlating parents. For example, if I wanted to quantify the fitness of mice, I would attempt to track the population's number of viable offspring that each female would have while also recording how long each parent/offspring would live. From there, the populations of mice that would live the longest and produce the most similar offspring would be deemed more "fit" compared to the other mice. The hardest part of this process is to tag and keep track of a sample population and also to know exactly how long each individual would live.

In the end, there is no perfect way to measure fitness, but as scientists, we can try the best we can and go from there. Also, the Daft Punk song that I reference in the title of this blog has a legit trap remix if you're bored and want to listen?


Fin.

2 comments:

  1. I agree with your definition of fitness and how you would observe it! The daft punk video is a nice touch! Do you think it would be better to do a long study over time observing the mice or do you think a short study would do the trick for measuring fitness?

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  2. Hi Bridgett, I find you Daft Punk reference quite funny. Also I think you did a great job covering the basics of fitness. Nice!

    ReplyDelete

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