Beasts Evolve!

We are finalizing the written materials for this activity now. When they are complete, they will be reformatted and made available here.

A teaser of the introductory material is below. Stay tuned!

Concept

Understand the theory of evolution by natural selection by creating a fictional population of “beasts” and observing evolution in action over multiple generations.

Introduction

Back in the 1800’s, after each traveling the world and seeing all kinds of fascinating and bizarre plants and animals, two British naturalists—one named Charles Darwin and the other named Alfred Russell Wallace—both independently came to the conclusion that all living things evolve in response to a force called natural selection.

The idea that organisms change over time was not new. Ancient Greeks, Arabs, and Romans had all developed evolutionary ideas many years before Darwin and Wallace. The revolutionary part of their theory was that nature “selects” which individuals are able to survive and reproduce based on how successful they are in their environment. Some individuals are slightly more likely to survive than the others they are competing with because every individual has a slightly different set of traits. Some traits help them to survive in a particular environment—these are called adaptations—and if they are more likely to survive they are also more likely to be able to reproduce. Over many generations where more and more of the most highly adapted organisms pass these adaptations on to their children, the population as a whole becomes more adapted to its environment. This is evolution by natural selection.

The presence of variation in traits is important to the process of adaptation because, if the environment changes, the set of traits that would be most adaptive in that environment will change. An organism’s fitness always depends on the environment at a particular time and place. Imagine a lizard suddenly being transported to the arctic, or a fish taken out of water. Mutations introduce new variation into a population, and can be passed onto offspring. This allows for populations to continue to adapt to new or changing environments.

Vocabulary

Evolution… is a change in a population over time. Individuals do not evolve, because evolution happens over many generations.

Natural Selection… is a gradual process in which the individuals that are most suited to their environment are more likely to survive and produce more offspring. This means their descendents will make up more of the population in the following generations.

Traits… are characteristics of an organism which are created and controlled by their genes. Traits can include any part of an organism, including its anatomical structures, its behaviors and instincts, and the biochemical reactions within its cells.

Adaptations… are traits that make an individual more successful in a specific environment. These traits tend to increase in a population over time, if the environmental conditions remain the same, because natural selection favors them.

Variation… is the presence of different traits within a population, rather than just one type. Individuals in sexually reproducing populations are a mixture of their parents’ traits, and this helps to maintain variation between individuals.

Mutations… are random mistakes in an individual’s genetic code that create new variation. They can be helpful or harmful, but are usually harmful to an organism that is already well-adapted to its environment.

Materials Needed

• Student Packet (1 per student)
• Teacher’s Guide (1 per instructor)
• Beast Research Sheets (5 per student, plus extras)
• Markers, Crayons, or Colored Pencils (1 pack per 2-3 students, with at least the following colors: brown, violet, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and black)
• Twenty-sided dice (1 per classroom)
• Six-sided dice (1 per 2-3 students)

All materials related to the 'Beasts Evolve!' activity made available here are released under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license, except those created by and credited to others. See the license for a summary of the terms. Note that any commercial use of these materials is prohibited except with the express written permission of the authors.

The 'monster emoji' image is used under the Open License from Phantom Open Emoji/Emojidex and is distributed under the same license.