Principles of Evolution Lecture Chapter 1 -4

Chapter 1 - 4 Lecture Flashcards

Which of the following best describes Charles Darwin’s idea of common descent?

All species evolved from a single original life form

Mendel’s theory of particulate inheritance replaced Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

False

Uniformitarianism, the idea that the same processes operated in both the past and the present, was first articulated by _____.

Charles Lyell

Which theory was the primary evolutionary theory before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species?

Lamarck’s Theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics

The naturalistic fallacy makes which of the following claims

What is natural is ethically good

Biologists now consider any change in an organism to be biological evolution.

False

The theory of natural selection does not depend on which of the following?

Purpose

Which of the following best defines biological evolution?

Accumulated random changes in an individual over its lifetime

1. The system of binomial nomenclature we use today in taxonomy was developed by _____.

Carolus Linnaeus

The ultimate cause of deer scent marking in response to other deer scent marks is _____.

Scent-marking deer had more offspring than deer that did not scent mark.

Among tetrapods five digits is an ancestral character state. Humans and other primates, most frogs and salamanders, lizards, rodents, and many other species retain this ancestral condition. However, all these species differ in many other ways exhibiting unique, evolutionarily derived character states not found in the most recent common ancestor of the tetrapods. Rodents have chisel-like incisors that grow throughout their lives. Unlike other tetrapods, primates have nails rather than claws on their digits and many have opposable thumbs. The hind limbs of frogs are uniquely specialized for jumping. The observation that some traits accumulate changes at a greater pace than others is known as _____.

Mosaic evolution

Biological characters that have accumulated changes over time that render them non-functional are known as _____.

Vestigial

The Hawaiian silverswords are a group of plants found only in the Hawaiian Islands that evolved from a single colonization event and after which evolved into a diversity of different species occupying different ecological niches. This sort of pattern of evolution is known as _____.

Adaptive radiation

Which of the following terms describes significant evolutionary changes in biological characters that take place over comparatively short time spans

Saltation

An enclosed globular eye with a lens that focuses light on a retina lined with photosensitive cells may be found in both cephalopod mollusks (such as octopus) and in vertebrates. Which of the following best describes the similarities between the eyes found in cephalopods and vertebrates?

Convergent evolution

Species are sometimes the result of crosses between two evolutionarily different lineages. This type of species may be particularly common among plants such as sunflowers in the genus Helianthus. This is best described as an example of _____.

Hybrid speciation

Which of the following statements best reflects what nodes on a phylogenetic tree represent?

Nodes represent the relative positions of hypothetical common ancestors to the taxa on the tree

Phylogenetic trees may only be constructed using molecular genetic data such as DNA or protein sequences.

False

Which of the following has been shown to be compelling evidence for evolution and common ancestry?

Geographic distributions

Intermediate forms

Vestigial character states

Which of the following is an example of a convergent trait?

The triangular dorsal fin in sharks and dolphins.