This is, admittedly, more scientific and probably also shorter than my posts usually are, but I’ve been busy, so this fun micro-essay for AP Biology is what I decided to post this week. I hope that, at the very least, this encourages you to look further into the various theories and system processes in biology; it’s actually quite interesting.
The Theory of Natural Selection states, in priniciple, that the organisms with traits that are advantageous in their environments will be the ones that survive to produce offspring, or to produce more offspring than their competition, passing on the desirable trait. According to Endosymiotic Theory, eukaryotes were formed when a larger organism engulfed a mitochondria and/or a cholorplast, and, finding that it produced energy, kept it.
This, of course, makes perfect sense in explaining why eukaryotes rose in the evolutionary ladder. Where many organisms would still have been respirating anaerobically, producing only 2 ATP (adenine triphosphate) per respiratory cycle, the newly formed eukaryotes, with their mitochondria, would have been able to partake in aerobic respiration, which can produce up to 38 ATP per cycle.
With the increased efficiency of energy production, and the initial lack of competition over the oxygen necessary for aerobic respiration, the eukaryotic organisms would have had a massive advantage over their mitochondria-less counterparts, increasing their likelihood of reproduction to pass the trait on.
To reiterate, the acquisition of a mitochondria, and with it, cellular respiration, would dramatically increase an organism’s efficiency of energy intake, giving it a distinctive evolutionary advantage over other primordial life forms.
