I need scholarly resources for a paper on "Animal Adaptations - How They're Perfect For Their Environment." :)

Question

These resources have to be Good resources from scholarly journals. The articles have to be about structures, not behavior, so please, no animal psych. stuff. Lol If anyone can help me, I'd really appreciate it! Thanks so much!

Answer 1

You should try searching in Google Scholar:
http://scholar.google.com

where you will find an enormous amount of publications.

Plus, here's a list of works that specifically address adaptation, from talkorigins:
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/biblio/adaptations.html

I also recommend you search for books and articles from people such as Stephen Jay Gould (he wrote several books of essays with scholarly sources) or Richard Lewontin.

And if what you need are specific examples, try any good Evolution textbook, such as the one by Ridley, or Freeman & Herron, or Futuyma. All these have whole chapters dedicated to adaptation, and cite the most relevant works.


Now, apart from this, I understand that this is the title/subject of the assignment you got, but I still want to point out that animals are not "perfect" for their environment. You might consider that the animals and their environment are continuously operating on each other, in a dynamic interaction. As Richard Lewontin pointed out, "the environment" cannot be defined without the animal, it's not a collection of ecological niches waiting to be filled by a species. The niche arises in these evolutionary interactions.

In addition, considering that a population (of any given species) is formed by individuals that vary in most of their characters, the "perfectly adapted" individual is a theoretical abstraction, and relative to the environment as it exists (i.e. a trait that was adaptively advantageous under certain circumstances, might not be advantageous at all if the environment changes).

Also, natural selection (which leads to what we call adaptation) is not the only evolutionary force. Researchers are well aware of this when they propose an adaptive explanation for any character (structure, behavior, etc ). They are presenting an hypothesis, but always recognizing that there are other evolutionary forces at work, and that all of us living beings are limited by various types of constraints. It would be nice to have wheels, but our biomechanical systems don't allow them.

Sorry for such a lengthy answer! and good luck with your paper :-)

Answer 2

http://www.uen.org/utahlink/activities/view_activity.cgi?activity_id=4750
http://www.itss.brockport.edu/~llac0731/605.html

Try these web sites , i hope they will help you