W09 L2 - Mendelian Genetics and Evolution - Lecture 2 Flashcards

Flashcards based on the second lecture covering the origins of genetics, heredity, genotype, phenotype, and Mendelian laws.

What are the three main questions that genetics attempts to answer?

Where do living things come from?

What makes living things different from non-living things?

What tells a cell how to be?

Who is often credited with some of the earliest written attempts to answer questions related to heredity?

Aristotle

According to Aristotle, what were the three different types of plants and animals?

Those that reproduce from seed, transforming organisms, and those that arise spontaneously.

What is the key limitation Pliny the Elder and others faced when trying to understand where life comes from?

They lacked the technology to observe the small things that give rise to life (e.g., sperm and egg).

What is the core idea behind the scientific method?

Science is an iterative process of observation, hypothesis formation, prediction, testing, and refinement.

How did scientists in the "Minecraft era" of experimentation approach understanding spontaneous generation?

Scientists during this period conducted experiments by haphazardly combining various substances in an attempt to observe the spontaneous creation of life, akin to trial-and-error gameplay.

Who is credited with the experiment that finally disproved the theory of spontaneous generation?

Louis Pasteur

What is the meaning of 'Omnivivum ex ovo'?

All life comes from eggs.

In the context of genetics, what is an embryo?

An immature organism that will grow to form a mature organism.

What is the main idea behind preformation?

The egg contains a miniature adult, which then grows.

What is the concept of epigenesis?

The embryo is an unformed thing that unfolds, develops, and changes as it grows into an adult.

What is the key idea of genetics in terms of information?

Transmitting information from one generation to the next.

What were two unanswered key questions in genetics in the mid-1800s?

How does inheritance actually work? Can children inherit acquired traits?

Why can’t blending inheritance be how inheritance actually works truly?

Because children can be taller or shorter than either parent. Plus everything should average out over millions of generations.

What is blending inheritance?

The idea that children are an average of their parents.

What is one reason the blending model of inheritance was problematic?

It cannot account for diversity in the population.

What is a true breeding strain of plant?

When self-fertilized, it will always yield the same result

What are the Mendelian factors now called?

Genes

How did Sutton and Boveri contribute to understanding inheritance?

They observed chromosomes and their behavior during cell division, providing a physical basis for Mendelian inheritance.

What did Ronald Fisher explain that helped resolve the problem of blended inheritance?

Continuous traits like height are the aggregate effect of multiple genes.