Evolutionary Biology Final Review - Practice Quiz Questions

Which of the following is NOT a target cell of HIV?

Eosinophil Cells

How does HIV enter human immune cells?

By binding to the CCR4 and CD4 Cell Receptors

Which of the following best describes the mechanism of AZT?

It interferes with reverse transcription by inserting itself in place of thymidine

Why is HAART more effective than AZT for treating HIV?

It targets multiple mechanisms at once to limit risk of resistance

HIV-1 likely arose from ____ SIV strains while HIV-2 likely arose from _____ HIV-2 Strains.

Chimpanzee; Sooty Mangabey

In HIV selection tends to favor ____ virulence.

Intermediate

Which of the following was NOT a principle of Special Creation?

Continental Drift happened rapidly

Which of the following is generally credited to the work of Hutton?

The idea of geological change

The work of Lamarck has been partially reevaluated in recent years due to advances in the understanding of _____.

Epigenetics

Where were Darwin’s most important observation made while on the voyage of the Beagle?

Galapagos Islands

Homologous structures provide evidence for ___ while analogous structures provide evidence for ____.

Common Ancestry; Convergent Evolution

Pseudogenes are genetic examples of:

Vestigial Structures

Fossil records are especially important to establishing the concepts of

Extinction and Succession

What are the closest living relatives of theropods?

Birds

Which of the following was NOT a geologist whose work influenced our understanding of modern Evolutionary Biology?

Lamark

Modern Radiometric data suggest that the earth is approximately:

4.5 billion years old

Which of the following is NOT one of Darwin’s original four postulates?

Mutation is the ultimate source of genetic variation

Who independently developed the idea of Natural Selection aside from Darwin?

Wallace

Which of the following is the best definition of Darwinian fitness?

The ability of an individual to survive and reproduce in its environment

Which of the following is NOT a reason why measuring heritability is difficult in the Daphne Major finches?

Frequent dispersal to other islands

After a drought event, selection favored deep beaks in finches. Which of the following is the best explanation for why small beaked finches still exist on the island?

Selective pressures are dynamic between years

Natural Selection acts on ____ but evolution occurs in ___.

Individuals; Populations

Natural Selection allows individuals to prepare for future environmental changes.

False

Which of the following is NOT a reason that individuals may engage in apparently altruistic acts?

The individuals are doing it for the good of the group as a whole

A modern understanding of how traits were inherited required the synthesis of the work of Darwin and _____.

Mendel

The field of _____ is concerned with classifying organisms into groups, while ____ is concerned with reconstructing evolutionary relationships.

Taxonomy; Phylogeny

Occam’s razor is associated with what method of phylogenic tree construction?

Maximum Parsimony

Reptiles are ___ with respect to birds in current taxonomy.

Paraphyletic

Distance-Based methods have what notable drawback?

They are susceptible to error associated with homoplasy

Which of the following lines of evidence did NOT support a whale+hippo clade within artiodactyls?

Parsimony of Astragalus Evolution

Environmental sex determination in Leopard Geckos is an example of what type of inheritance?

Genotype-by-Environment Interaction

____ Mutations are at least twice as common as ____ in nature.

Transition; Transversion

A ____ Mutation results in the change of an amino acid sequence while a ____ mutation does not.

Nonsynonymous; Synonymous

Why are gene duplications interesting from an evolutionary perspective?

They free the extra copy from natural selection

In Drosophila, inversion frequencies are linked to?

Temperature and Body Size

If Dr. Richard Schmidt had been innocent and had not inoculated his nurse/ex-lover/patient Ms. Trahan with HIV, what would we have seen?

HIV virions in Ms. Trahan would have been phylogenetically distantly related to any virions in any of Dr. Schmidt’s patients

In a sample of cows, there are 3MM, 7Mm, and 10mm genotypes. What can we calculate from this data?

All answers are correct

Hair is a/an ___ with regard to the tree.

Autapomorphy

What do the graphs suggest with regard to resistance of HIV?

That a population of HIV virions has evolved resistance to AZT in less than 20 months in both patients

Which of the following statements is true regarding maximum Likelihood methods?

They build trees based on models of evolution

Which best describes a one-island model of migration?

A mainland send migrants into a smaller population causing allele frequencies to change in the smaller population

In the absence of other evolutionary forces, migration will cause _____.

allele freqencies to homogenize across populations & Fst to go to 0

Which of the following is an assumption of Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium?

Random Mating Occurs

An individual’s genotype is AARr and gets a new mutation in a gamete such that a “A” mutates to “a” so one of its offspring is AaRr with two genes on the same chromosome such that Ar and aR are together, which is true?

Selection that favors the new “a” allele will cause an increase in the “R” allele

In a population, 68% of eggs and sperm received an allele W and the remaining gametes received an allele w. What is the expected genotypic frequecy of heterozygotes?

0.4352

In cases where a perpetual “arms race” occurs between biological antagonists, such as parasites and their hosts, sex is favored because it increases genetic recombination increasing the likelihood of evolving novel genotypes in a variable environment. This is called____.

Red Queen Hypothesis

Why is it that “Muller’s Ratchet” does not explain, by itself, the adaptive significance of sex?

Muller’s ratchet takes a long time for chance Events to eliminate low mutation classes

QTL mapping us used to…?

Locate genes with phenotypic effects on quantitative traits

You observe a population where the number of each individual of a single locus trait controlled by two alleles A and a is:

AA = 113

Aa = 156

aa = 201

After a harsh winter you observe the following number of each genotype:

AA = 101, Aa = 112, aa = 194

Given the observed pattern of survival, what type of selection appears to be acting on these genotypes?

Underdominance

After controlling for the effect of relatedness among species of bats, what was the conclusion with regard to testes size in bats?

Testes size is related to social group size

You are given the following table:

What is the chi-squared value for these observations?

111.31

Why don’t Fuchsia flowers drop immediately after pollination has finished?

They wait until the pollen tube has reached the ovary

In which of the following scenarios would it be important to perform phylogenetically independent contrasts?

To test for a correlation between genome size and host specificity among an array of parasitic species

An adaptation is?

A trait or suite of traits which increases one’s fitness

What is sexual dimorphism?

A difference in males and females of a species

If one parent invests more resources in offspring than the other, this

Would limit reproductive success of the more heavily investing parent

Male pipefish selecting less parasite-ridden females to mate with is an example of which type of sexual selection?

Intersexual Selection

Stalk-eyed flies are a good example of what type of sexual selection?

Runaway Sexual Selection

What is the similarity between frequency-dependent selection and heterozygote superiority?

Both patterns of selection maintain genetic diversity in populations

The frequency of recessive deleterious alleles q is 0.09 in a population of fruit flies. You examine many individuals over many generations and measure that the mutation rate of p to q is 0.0003. What would the strength of selection against the q allele need to be for the frequency of q = 0.06 to be maintained by selection-mutation balance?

0.37

The initial frequency of the delta 32 allele is 0.01 in a population where 25% of the wild type and 25% of the heterozygotes contracts AIDS and die without reproducing. Under such circumstances how would selection change the allele frequency?

Almost not at all

Why do Pier and colleagues hypothesize that cystic fibrosis (CF) might have such a high allele frequency?

CF heterozygotes may be resistant to Typhoid fever

In the one-island model, which quantity can you ignore?

The proportion of island emigrants

Sewall Wright proved that the probability that any given allele in a population will be the one that drifts to fixation is equal to what?

Allele’s initial frequency

What is the effective population size if you have 50 males and 100 females in a population? Assume random Mating, no selection, mutation, or migration, and round to nearest whole number.

133

When considering the role of mutations on allele frequency changes through time, the occurrence of back mutations (that fix the mutation) are often ignored/

This is not problematic because the back mutation rate is so low

As allele frequencies in a finite population drift toward fixation or loss, what happens to the frequency of heterozygotes in the population?

Heterozygosity decreases

Which of the following is FALSE concerning the neutral theory of natural selection?

Holds that advantageous mutations are common enough that they cannot be ignored

Most of the 20 amino acids are encoded by more than one codon. We might expect that codon usage would be random, and that each codon in a suite of synonymous codons would be present in equal numbers. However, this is not true. What name is given to the above phenomenon?

Codon Bias

What is a species?

All of the above

Which of the following transitions in energy allocation do you expect to see before vs after sexual maturity is reached?

Growth then reproduction

Evolutionary Game Theory…

All of the above

In parental studies in villages in Trinidad, Flynn discovered that:

There was less interaction but more of it was agnostic (negative) with non-genetic children

Which of the following is FALSE?

Earlier human species died sequentially, leading to Homo sapiens today

What is currently the earliest known hominin?

Sahelanthropus tchadensis

Which behavior results in a cost to both actor and recipient?

Spiteful

In the African Replacement Theory were true, allele patterns should demonstrate:

Greater diversity in Africa with European and Asian alleles as subsets of African alleles

Which trait would we likely see appear around the same time that language evolved?

Larynx is lower in throat

Every concept of species and speciation has what common thread?

Restricted gene flow

What feature of Homo florensiensis make this discovery so interesting?

That this new species of human temporally overlapped with modern humans

Given the data that we now know, what can we say about Homo sapiens?

All answers are correct

Which of the following hypotheses best describes virulence evolution for the majority of known pathogens?

The trade-off hypothesis

Male reed buntings do not always father all nestlings given birth by their mate. Therefore, we would expect that male reed buntings would allocate ________ resources to clutches where________ chicks are fathered by them.

Fewer;Fewer

You are studying two populations of white-tailed deer and notice that the populations are quite distinct in many traits, including body size, size of offspring, and number of offspring. Natural selection should act on the deer in each population in such a way that they allocate energy to maximize…?

Lifetime reproductive success

Why is it that certain strains of influenza (such as the 1918 Spanish flu) are so much more deleterious than other annual strains?

Influenza is known to be able to swap RNA’s causing associated host species switching

There is a species of plant that occurs along a mountain slope, over tens of thousands of years; those populations at the top of the mountain differentiate (adapt to higher altitude) from those in the valley. However, low levels of gene flow exist throughout the entire range creating a hybrid zone at an intermediate altitude. What has occurred here?

Parapatric Speciation

Social castes, sexual dimorphism and genetic polymorphism are major difficulties for the__________ species concept

Morphological

Which was the first species of hominin to leave Africa?

Homo erectus

The wealth of evidence of early hominin evolution is that the pattern of evolution leading from our last common ancestor to present day Homo sapiens has been a steady transformation of a single lineage.

False

All genetic evidence agrees with the fact that Humans are more closely related to chimpanzees than either are to gorillas.

False

Humans share a more recent common ancestor with Homo ergaster than with Australopithecus anamensis.

True

Human and chimpanzee genomes are less similar to each other than the mouse genome is to the rat genome.

False

Based on genomic data, we infer that humans interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans because patterns of SNP excess indicate gene flow into non African human lineages.

True

Language most likely arose after the evolution of modern humans (Homo sapiens).

False

Human populations typically show as much genetic diversity within a population as among populations from different regions.

True

The human and chimpanzee lineage split approximately ____ years ago.

5.4 million

Which of the following suggests human behavior evolved, at least in part, due to natural selection?

the study of human interactions where fathers had significantly more negative interactions with their step-children versus biological children

Is antibiotic resistance costly for bacteria to produce?

sometimes

Compared to the influenza lineages that die out, the influenza lineages that survive over many generations of infecting humans will have:

Many replacement substitutions in antigenic sites but few in non-antigenic sites

Under the biological species concept, what is the criterion for identifying evolutionary independence?

Reproductive Isolation