Viviana Herrera Assignment 1 The book the beak of the finch illustrate some of the basic concepts of evolution such as variation natural selection and extinction This book analyses some of the Darwin perspectives and the perspectives of other evolutionary scientist after him The concepts I will talk about were extracted from the chapters 3 4 and 8 of the book The first concept is variation It seems that variation is a universal phenomenon that occurs in many species In his travel to the Galapagos Islands Darwin notices thirteen species of finches All of them with variations in their size and length and variations in their beaks Darwin attributed these variations as a response to environmental change The individual adapt its body to the environment in order to increase its opportunity of survive These variations are inherited from the parents to their offspring In the book the author shown an example of nature versus nurture to prove that variation is a biological process that is passed gradually from generation to generation He mentioned an experiment that consisted on changing the eggs of a couple of big finches with the eggs of the couple of small finches Obviously the size of the offspring was related to the size of their biological parents It means that change and variation is a process that takes time and is passed through generations The most successful species pass their genes to the other generations creating a new variation or a new derivate specie Nevertheless a variation is not always an improvement sometimes a variation can lead to the extinction of a specie The author also illustrate variation as a result of competition During the wet season the Galapagos finches eat all the same seeds regarding of their sizes and beaks However in the dry season every bird started to specialize in one kind of seed usually according to their size and their beaks As we can observe in the dry season the competition increase It means that the birds need to find other sources of food that other bird cannot eat in that way they can guaranty themselves a supply of food and decrease the tensions of competition If two birds of the same specie with the same characteristics get Viviana Herrera together in the same habitat they would enter in conflict leading to natural selection which determine that is going to be a winner and a loser Natural selection and extinction are two terms highly related Natural selection determines that only one species can survive while the other will die The rules are simple the one who best adapt itself to the environment is the one who survive Natural selection is highly related with reproduction Only the best genes are the ones who are going to prevail This concept is shown in the book through hybridization A hybrid is the result of the breeding of two different species In the book there is an example of a couple of finches of two species who breed and produced four chicks Usually hybrids are sterile which mean that they cannot produce offspring this is a failure and natural selection let this species to die However not all hybrids are sterile In fact in the book we can observe that some of the birds who pair with a bird of another specie produced stronger and fitted offspring Their offspring could breed successfully and they could adapt to the environment better than those pureblood birds