Ecology and evolution
5.1 Communities and populations.
5.3 Populations.
5.4 Evolution.
5.5 Classification
Essential Question: Do all ecosystems share a universal set of features or is each one unique in its structure and interactions?
Entangled bank: A beautiful piece of literature found at the conclusion of the Origin of Species.
'It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds. With birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborate constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.
These laws, taken in the biggest sense, being Growth and Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less improved forms.
Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms so beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved'.
(Chapter 14: Recapitulation and Conclusion) Darwin. C (1859) Origin of Species