What Darwin Never Saw
Glossary
- adaptation
- making physical or behavioral adjustments to changing environmental conditions.
- archipelago
- a cluster of islands, including the waters that surround them.
- ecologist
- one who studies interactions of various life forms.
- ecosystem
- a system involving all interactions of living and non-living components of a given area.
- El Nino
- a mass of unseasonably warm water in the eastern pacific which warms up the ocean.
- endangered
- threatened with extinction.
- environmental impact
- any significant effect of development upon the environment.
- evolution
- cumulative change in the gene frequencies of a population of organisms occurring in the course of successive generations related by descent, i.e., descent with change.
- habitat
- the native environment of an animal or plant.
- interdependence
- a relationship in which organisms meet each other's needs.
- natural selection
- the principle mechanism of evolutionary change described by Darwin in 1859; the mechanism whereby those individuals best adapted to the environment contribute more offspring to succeeding generations than do the remainder, so that as their characteristics are inherited, the composition of the population is changed.
- species
- a class of individuals having common characteristics and qualities.
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