Evo-Ed: Games and Simulations. Monkey Opsins Color Vision - The Hungry Monkey Trichromatic monkeys can find conspicuously colored food much better than dichromats. Will you be an effective forager under dichromatic conditions? Play the game and find out! To read an abstract of the original experiment see: Caine and Mundy 2000. Color Vision - Find the Circle... Quickly! Dichromatic monkeys are good at shape recognition when color-interference is high. Mouse Fur Color Fur Color - Colonizing the Beach When mice are camouflaged in their surroundings they will likely have a better chance to reproduce and pass their color alleles down to their offspring. Fur Color - The Mouse Hunter In this simulation you get to be the predator. The above simulations were inspired by research conducted by Kaufman (1974) and by research being conducted at the Hoekstra lab at Harvard University.
Pea Taste Pea Taste - The Selective Farmer The round allele R is dominant and the wrinkled allele r is recessive. Equilibrium and Mutation. When there's a medical mystery, a conundrum, a puzzler, a what the heck is that, everyone knows who to call, the Medical Examiner. The ME has the knowledge, the experience, the tenacity, the gumption to get the job done. He also has the Assistant who does all the actual work. The ME picked up the object with a pair of tweezers. The assistant asked “What is it?” “A blue hair.” “Hare?” “Yeah.” “Then why don't you cheer it up by singing Hoppy Days Are Here Again.” “What's that, you say?” “Hoppy Days are….” “I heard you the first time,” the ME replied testily. He placed the clue in a plastic baggy, which had only recently held his peanut butter sandwich. In today's episode, the Medical Examiner and his Assistant are confronted by a frightening cosmetological disorder: the Blue Hair syndrome.
Check your local listings for times! Copyright University of Maryland, 2007 You may link to this site for educational purposes. Please do not copy without permission. Origin. Life's Origins In 1864, Louis Pasteur described his experiments showing that microbial life could not originate spontaneously in the absence of preexisting life. This work is considered a landmark in modern science because it settled a longstanding controversy over spontaneous generation Spontaneous generation is the idea that organisms could form miraculously from non-living material. But Pasteur's results posed a new riddle for evolutionary biologists: If life could only arise from life, how did living organisms initially appear on the planet?
The answer came in the 1920's when A.I. Oparin of Russia and J.B.S. Haldane of England independently presented compelling arguments that the origin of life could be explained, not as the result of rapid spontaneous generation of whole organisms in a few weeks, but from a long and gradual process of chemical evolution. Today, research into the origin of life is interdisciplinary with workers trying to answer four main questions: 1. 3. 4. 1. 2. 4. Genetic Drift Simulation. Understanding Evolution. The Making of the Fittest: The Birth and Death of Genes. Mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria, the oxygen-processing factories of eukaryotic cells, have their own DNA, a relic from the distant past when they were free-living organisms. Evidence of this is the slightly different genetic codes found in nonplant mitochondria. For example: (For those who may be interested, here is the entire sequence of a human mitochondrial DNA.)
Another significant difference in mitochondrial DNA is that it is circular, like the DNA of prokaryotes. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited ONLY in the maternal line; all of the mitochondrial DNA in any living human came from that individual's mother. Thus, it is not altered by sexual reproduction; that is, it does not undergo recombination. Bryan Sykes, at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, has summarized the work of his group and several others: Sykes gave these women names, and in a book called "Seven Daughters of Eve", explained the methodology and presented imaginary lives for the women. Tree Building. Behold The Mighty Water Bear.