The Idea Of Population Thinking Was Created By Ernst Mayr

The idea of population thinking was created by Ernst Mayr in 1959. With this term, Mayr set out to emphasize a type of ideology that had already been brought up within evolutionary biology and systematics. Population thinking can be described as the idea that the population is real, filled with variation among the individuals in it. In using this ideology, one looks at a population, comes up with statistics of variation among the individuals within it, and forms an abstract type based on the average of what the individuals look like in the population. From this, a population thinker would be able to conclude that every individual is different in various ways, and that the abstract type is merely just an abstraction taken from the real population

With tree thinking, one focuses more on explaining events of evolution and where they occur on a phylogeny. It is a great way to dissect relationships between events or species to further understand them and their relatedness to each other over time. An example of tree thinking would be if someone were to question what species were closest in relationship/ familiar to humans. In this case, a tree thinker would form a tree, drawing multiple branches with each species on it that have characteristics in common with humans, such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and gibbons, showing their evolutionary relationship. The next form of thinking, known as group thinking, can be characterized in general terms as classification. With this type of thinking, comes replicates that give one an overall picture of the species or members of the class. An example of it would be classifying valleys. Each valley would be an independent replicate of the overall group of valleys in the class of landforms and with this, each replicate is seen as a common picture that can describe the group of valleys. Thus, if someone were to look at one independent replicate of a valley, they could assume that the other valleys in the group match this replicate. Lastly, the third type of thinking is known as developmental thinking, which can be described as thinking that sees the history of evolution as an

In the 20th century, the history of evolution developed further into the theory that over time, species change and the main reason for this is natural selection. Natural selection happens when organisms more adapted to their environment have a higher survival rate overtime, and with this, their genes pass through generations as they reproduce. These three types of thinking further expand this theory, fitting into the history of evolutionary biology, by depicting the history of organisms and species within a population over time. Despite each way of thinking being different, they all classify organisms, as well as shine light upon evolutionary changes that happen over the years, bringing new information into the history of evolution. Therefore, these ways of thinking show the process of natural selection first hand, the origins of certain species, and their relatedness as they developed from their earlier forms, which is the main idea of evolutionary