Sentences with phrase «idea of a common ancestor»

Not exact matches

Another way the term evolution is used in biology is to refer to the idea of «common descent,» that all species alive today and which have ever existed descend from a single ancestor which existed at some time in the past.

I marveled at a chart that showed a diagram of the tree of life, where relationships between different mammalian species were figured out solely by comparison of their DNA sequences, providing powerful support for Darwin's idea of descent from a common ancestor with natural selection operating on randomly occurring variations.

The notion of A. nyktos as an intermediate step between monotremes and peramurans would lend support to the idea that monotremes share a much more recent common ancestor with marsupials and placentals than previously thought.

«The tiny size and very basal evolutionary position of Archicebus support the idea that the earliest primates, as well as the common ancestor of tarsiers and anthropoids, was miniscule.

He says this idea has «very profound» implications for the debate over the origins of bacterial genes that are present in the human genome but absent in our closest relatives (Science, 8 June, p. 1903): The amount of conjugation Waters detected is «high enough to readily explain» the possible infiltration of bacterial genesinto our DNA, meaning that conjugation could have happened quickly enough to add genes only to humans, in the years since they split from the common ancestor they shared with chimpanzees.

That means that although it can give scientists a rough idea of what the common ancestor to all living apes and humans would have looked like, drawing other meaningful conclusions could be challenging.

The findings support the idea that gills evolved before the last common ancestor of all vertebrates, helping facilitate a «lifestyle transition» from immobile filter - feeder to actively swimming predator.

The finding supports an existing idea that the three master limb - replacers last shared a common ancestor about 420 million years ago, and it suggests that the evolutionary process of growing limbs is saved over time, not developed independently in separate species, the researchers report today in PLOS ONE.

Dr. Daniel Gebo, an expert on the evolution of body anatomy in primates, said that, «The tiny size and very basal evolutionary position of Archicebus support the idea that the earliest primates, as well as the common ancestor of tarsiers and anthropoids, were miniscule.

Tracing back through time and examining common ancestors of migratory and non-migratory species, they were able to conclude that there was more evidence supporting the idea that birds lived year - round in North America and began migrating further and further south, resulting in today's birds migrating thousands of miles every year.

And then at the same time, when they were looking at the pelvis, and this caused a big stir at the meeting, so there's been this idea that Lucy's species, you know, the changes that you get in the pelvis from the last common ancestor of humans and chimps were to, sort of, make us good at upright walking; and then further changes to the pelvis that you see in the evolution of our genus which will accommodate babies with larger brains.

Examines one of the most breathtaking ideas in the history of science — that all life on this planet descended from a common ancestor.

In the West, the «space marine» interpretation is obviously the most popular, while Japan adopted the mecha aspects of the novel's powered armor as their own, but it has only been recently that we've started to see the two different genres, which share the same common ancestor, sharing ideas.