Standard 6g Preknowledge
6g) ***Students know how to distinguish between the accommodation of an individual organism to its environment and the gradual adaptation of a lineage of organisms through genetic change.
CALIFORNIA FRAMEWORKS SUMMARY:
Living organisms may adapt to changing environments through nongenetic changes in their structure, metabolism, or behavior or through natural selection of favorable combinations of alleles governing any or all of these processes. Genetic and behavioral adaptations are sometimes difficult to identify or to distinguish without studying the organism over a long time. Physical changes are slow to develop in most organisms, requiring careful measurements over many years. Examining fossil ancestors of an organism may help provide clues for detecting adaptation through genetic change. Genetic change can institute behavioral changes, making it all the more complicated to determine whether a change is solely a behavioral accommodation to environmental change.
Through the use of print and online resources in library-media centers, students can research the effects of encroaching urbanization on undeveloped land and consider the effects on specific species, such as the coyote (not endangered) and the California condor (endangered). Such examples can illustrate how some organisms adapt to their environments through learned changes in behavior, and others are unsuccessful in learning survival skills. Over a long time, organisms can also adapt to changing environments through genetic changes, some of which may include genetically determined changes in behavior. Such changes may be difficult to recognize because a long time must elapse before the changes become evident. Studies of the origins of desert pup fish or blind cave fish may help students understand how gradual genetic changes in an organism lead to adaptations to changes in its habitat.