Evolution Essay

Evolution is one of the major unifying concepts of modern biology. Entailed with the concept of evolution, are the mechanisms that are involved with evolutionary change. There are many mechanisms that lead to evolutionary change. Random changes in the genetic composition of a population are called genetic drift. The mechanisms that cause random change include mutation, founder effects, and genetic bottlenecks. All genetic variation originates from mutation. A mutation is a hereditary change in the DNA sequence or in chromosome number, form, or structure. Mutations can be point mutations, deletions and insertions, or changes in the total amount of DNA and number of genes. Mutations are not random, in the sense that they occur more frequently in some locations, and under some circumstances, than others. However, mutations are random in the sense that there is no systematic relationship betw...