Evolutionary Biology - Exam 1 Multiple Choice Practice Problems

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 affective 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 is generally credited to the work of the Hutton?

The idea of geological change

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

continential drift happened rapidly

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 observations 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?

Lamarck

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 phylogenetic 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 below.

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