Whats the difference between the process and pattern of evolution?

Hi!

A process is a series of actions that are taken to accomplish a particular end. For example, if you want to apply for a particular college, then the process includes a series of actions, starting with you sending an application to that particular college, as well as sending them your SAT or ACT scores and grade point averages, and may also include writing an essay telling them why you want to go to that college. An evolutionary process is similar. For example, take the evolution of a bigger brain in humans. The process that most scientists would use to describe this change is neoteny, which is the retention of juvenile features in the adult. Since juvenile apes have proportionally larger brains and weaker jaws than the adults, humans evolved a larger brain by looking like a juvenile ape. Neoteny therefore is the process of evolution.

A pattern is something in common that an observer may discern when looking a number of different events. For example, if an observer sees that all of the people who wear skirts or dresses go to the female restroom but none of them go into the man's rest room, then the observer can see a pattern of behavior. Similarly there may be some evolutionary processes that show the same pattern. For example, the manatee and whales both evolved from land animals into aquatic creatures, and both have lost the hindlegs and evolved a tail fluke in the process. Since whales and manatees are not closely related but they are nevertheless both mammals, then we can see a pattern in their processes of evolution from land mammals to aquatic mammals. That pattern is the loss of the hindlimbs and the acquistion of a horizontal tail fluke in the two independent processes. The next step after discovering a pattern is to formulate a hypothesis to explain why such a pattern exists, and whether the same pattern applies to other mammals and non-mammals that have returned to the sea, such as the sea otter. For example, we can ask why the sea otter did not lose its hindlimbs and evolve an horizontal tail fluke. Is it because the sea otter has not returned to the sea long enough? Does the horizontal tail fluke have anything to do with how the mammalian vertebral column can flex, versus how the vertebral column of, say, a shark (which has vertical tail fins) can flex?