Manchester, United Kingdom

Ecology and Evolution

Table of contents
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Ecology and Evolution at University of Manchester

Language: English Studies in English
University website: www.manchester.ac.uk
Type: PhD

Definitions and quotes

Ecology
Ecology (from Greek: οἶκος, "house", or "environment"; -λογία, "study of") is the branch of biology which studies the interactions among organisms and their environment. Objects of study include interactions of organisms with each other and with abiotic components of their environment. Topics of interest include the biodiversity, distribution, biomass, and populations of organisms, as well as cooperation and competition within and between species. Ecosystems are dynamically interacting systems of organisms, the communities they make up, and the non-living components of their environment. Ecosystem processes, such as primary production, pedogenesis, nutrient cycling, and niche construction, regulate the flux of energy and matter through an environment. These processes are sustained by organisms with specific life history traits. Biodiversity means the varieties of species, genes, and ecosystems, enhances certain ecosystem services.
Evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules.
Evolution
When things get bad enough, then something happens to correct the course. And it is for that reason that I speak of evolution as an error-making and error-correcting process. And if we can be ever so much better — ever so much slightly better — at error correcting than at error making, then we'll make it.
Jonas Salk, in "Jonas Salk, "A Wise and Good Ancestor" interview with Richard D. Heffner on The Open Mind (11 May 1985)
Evolution
Thus life by life and love by love
We passed through the cycles strange,
And breath by breath and death by death
We followed the chain of change.
Langdon Smith, in "Evolution" (1895)
Ecology
If we have been slow to develop the general concepts of ecology and conservation, we have been even more tardy in recognizing the facts of the ecology and conservation of man himself. We may hope that this will be the next major phase in the development of biology. Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather than in combat, with these forces.
Rachel Carson, "Essay on the Biological Sciences" in Good Reading (1958).
Preserving ecosystems and the biodiversity they support could reduce the emergence of infectious diseases from these natural systems. The current rates of biodiversity loss around the world could have major consequences for emerging diseases.
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