Evolution Quiz - Honors Biology

On May 8, 2025

Creationism

• Life is too complex to have developed through gradual evolution; they must have been designed by an intelligent creator (God)

• The Bible is a series of true historical accounts, and it details exactly how the world was created by God

Spontaneous Generation

• There is ample evidence of living things, especially mice or insects appearing suddenly from non-living matter, like animal waste or rotting food

• Many cultures believed that there was a force of nature that created things spontaneously with the right “ingredients” present

Inheritance of Acquired Traits

• Changes to organisms over their lifetimes get passed on to their offspring

• Organisms could actively change and improve themselves over time, leading to a continuous upward progression in the complexity and perfection of life forms

Darwin (and Wallace)’s Theory of Evolution

• The fossil record provides abundant evidence of life existing in the past and how they changed over time, including transitional species

• Similar environments often have similar species even if they are geographically distant, while nearby regions with different environments may have entirely different species. This suggests that species have evolved to adapt to their local environments.

• There are similarities in the structures of different organisms, even when their functions may be different

Evidence that can confirm evolution

• Anatomy (similar body structures)

• Embryos in development

• Fossils

• DNA Sequence

Embryos

• Similar development of the embryo is evidence of a common ancestor

• All three embryos have “gill pouches” in the folds of the neck. All three have tails (one is fish, others are rabbit, gorilla)

• The similarities indicated they are more closely related than differing embryos (Suggests that if traced back far enough the three will all have a common ancestor)

Anatomy

Similar structures, different functions suited to animal’s environment

DNA

• A molecular fossil

• The more DNA and amino acid sequences organisms have in common, they more closely related they are

• Different species of organisms may contain the same genes with slight variations in sequences

How does evolution of populations occur?

Natural selection

Fitness

“Survival of the fittest”

(In biology) can the individual reproduce and survive in its specific environment

(Most well-adapted organisms will survive and reproduce, leading to gradual evolution of the species of over time)

Darwin believed all living things came from a….

Common ancestor, then evolved by natural selection

Ancestry

How things can be related to each other and how we visualize these relationships

Phylogenetic Tree

Conceptualized by Darwin in his journal

*know how to read