The Ancestor s Tale By Richard Dawkins Essay - 1666 Words

Thylacinus had stripes like a tiger, body like a dog, and a pouch like a kangaroo. They were marsupials but behaved more like wolves than marsupials (which makes them an excellent example of convergent evolution). They became extinct in Australia and New Guinea because of their incompetence against the dingoes, an invasive species brought by the aboriginal men. Nevertheless, some were left in Tasmania as the dingoes did not reach there, but died out soon after Europeans arrived there. Similar story includes the dodo’s tale which is illustrated perfectly by Richard Dawkins in his book The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution - â€Å"When Portuguese sailors arrived on Mauritius in 1507, the abundant dodos were completely tame, and approached the sailors in a manner which cannot have been far from ‘trusting’. The unfortunate dodos were clubbed to death by Portuguese, and later Dutch, sailors – even though they were deemed ‘unpalatable.’ Extinction took less than two centuries. As so often, it came about through a combination of killing and more indirect effects. Humans introduced dogs, pigs, rats, and religious refugees. The first three ate dodo eggs, and the last planted sugar cane and destroyed habitats† (Dawkins). All the tales of these extinct species have one thing in common – a species live in harmony in its home until an invasive species destroy them, and humans are the antagonist in each story. The sick thing is we are still in the middle of and part ofShow MoreRelatedThe, Hunting For Some Drosophila Melanogaster5018 Words   |  21 Pageschromosomes will be inherited independently of each other (Campbell et al. 268). Many rudimentary patterns of inheritance follow traditional Mendelian genetic patterns, namely Mendel’s Law of Dominance (commonly known as Mendel’s â€Å"Third Law†). Mendel s Law of Dominance states that recessive alleles will always be masked by dominant alleles. Therefore, a cross between a homozygous dominant and a homozygous recessive will always express the dominant phenotype, while still having a heterozygous genotype