Chapter 3: Natural Selection and Adaptation

Segregation distortion

Segregation distortion

________ is any of several biological processes that alter the rules of Mendelian inheritance such that some alleles when heterozygous have a greater than 50- person chance of transmission to the offspring.

preadapted

A structure is ______ for a new function if it can assume that function without evolutionary modification; a feature that can be used for a different purpose, without meaning to or being evolved for that purpose.

Genetic drift

________ is the random fluctuations in the frequencies of genotypes within a population.

natural selection

If evolution by ________ is to occur, there must be a change in the population across generations, and this requires that the phenotypic differences among the entities be inherited.

Group selection

________ is the differential rate of origination or extinction of whole populations (or species) because of differences among them in one or more characteristics, as hypothesized by Wynne- Edwards.

Trade offs

________ are the existence of both a fitness benefit and a fitness cost of a mutation or character state, relative to another.

Character displacement

________ is the divergence of species as a consequence of their interaction.

Reproductive success

________ is sometimes used as another name for fitness; includes survival because organisms do not reproduce when they are dead.

Evolutionary geneticists

________ have long recognized that natural selection will cause an allele to increase in frequency if it consistently leaves more copies of itself to subsequent generations, no matter how it causes its greater success.

hypothetico deductive method

The ________ is the method for making a prediction deduced from a hypothesis.

Altruistic traits

________ are traits that are selfless to the individual.

Frequency

________ usually refers to a proportion and is measured in decimals and changes from 0 to 1.

Neutral alleles

________ may fluctuate in a population due to genetic drift.

Transposable elements

________ are among the many kinds of selfish genetic elements, which are transmitted at a higher rate than the rest of an individuals genome and may be detrimental to the organism.

Fitness

________ is the number of offspring an individual leaves in the next generation; components of fitness are survival and reproduction.

Sexual selection

________ is differential reproduction as a result of variation in the ability to obtain mates.

comparative method

The ________ is the method for comparing sets of species to pose or test hypotheses on adaption and other evolutionary phenomena.

segregation distortion

Some selfish alleles exhibit ________ and are passed to a heterozygous individuals gametes more than 50 percent of the time.

natural selection

A function is often adaptive if it is complex because complexity can not evolve except by ________.

Neutral alleles

________ are alleles that do not alter fitness.