What role do islands and mountain ranges play in Evolution?

Question

What role do islands and mountain ranges play in Evolution?

Answer 1

In micro evolution, they form a boundary. There is no macro evolution. God created every living to reproduce after its own kind.

Answer 2

Perhaps you mean "..in Natural Selection."

Natural barriers, such as mountains and sea can make populations change in different ways to their ancestors. For example there are wingless beetles on islands - where having no wings is an advantage - they don't get blown to sea.

This is not evolution, it is Natural Selection. Note that all such examples of NS involve a loss of genetic information, but never a gain.

Evolution hypothesises that there is some mechanism which adds genetic information. Mutations are alleged to do this, but all observed mutations are information neutral of lossy. NS acts to weed out mutations.

It suits some people to confuse the idea of Natural Selection (observed and not controversial) with goo-to-you evolution (definitely not observed, and very controversial).

Answer 3

Mountain ranges and islands isolate groups of species from the rest of the population. Because of this, each new population will evolve differently from the original one depending on what they need to do in order to compete and survive.