Quest 1

Question 1

Fitness

Answer 1

survival and reproduction rate

Question 2

Differential Reproductive Success

Answer 2

Individuals with certain traits are more successful than others at surviving and reproducing in their environment.

Question 3

Descent with Modification

Answer 3

new species arise from ancestral ones, with each generation inheriting traits (descent)/ modifications that have occurred along the way (ancestry).

Question 4

Phylogenetic diversity

Answer 4

describes the extent of evolutionary history that is represented among the organisms found in a particular area.

Question 5

Mutation…

Answer 5

is the the major source generating new variation, and it is random

Question 6

Life History Traits

Answer 6

traits that govern LHS (life history Strategy). Timing of sexual maturity, timing of aging, number and size of offspring, number of copulations etc. These traits lead to trade offs in biological systems

Question 7

Life History Strategy

Answer 7

schedule and manner of investment in survivorship and reproduction over the lifetime of an individual

Question 8

Antibiotic Resistance

Answer 8

The result of natural selection and can be understood only in the context of evolutionary biology (scary)

Question 9

Artificial Selection

Answer 9

the identification by humans of desirable traits in plants and animals, and the steps taken to enhance and perpetuate those traits in future generations

Question 10

Speciation

Answer 10

the evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct, reproductively isolated species, branching from a common ancestor

Question 11

Extinction

Answer 11

the permanent loss of all living members of a species

Question 12

Norm of Reaction

Answer 12

when individuals of the same genotype are exposed to varying environmental conditions (variations than can happen).

Question 13

Phenotype and Genotype

Answer 13

Genotype is an organism’s inherited genetic code (alleles), while genes + environment mold phenotype

Question 14

Vestigial Organs

Answer 14

reduced or non-functional body parts that were once fully developed and useful in ancestry species (appendix, wisdom teeth, etc.)

Question 15

Adaptation

Answer 15

Inheritance that makes an organism more fit in its abiotic and biotic environment, and that has arisen as a result of direct action of natural selection for its primary function. = testable hypothesis

Question 16

Exaptation

Answer 16

trait that serves a purpose now, but evolved under different selection conditions (sutures, feathers, etc.)

Question 17

Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics

Answer 17

(Lamarckism) is a 19th-century theory proposing that organisms pass physical traits, developed through use or disuse during their lifetime, to offspring (e.g., giraffes stretching necks).

Question 18

Pleiotropic Genes

Answer 18

When genes affect more than one characteristic

Question 19

Antagonistic Pleiotropy

Answer 19

genes that code for beneficial effects in one case code for deleterious effects in other contexts

Question 20

Complex traits: Two hypotheses

Answer 20

1) Each intermediate step along the way was adaptive, selected for, and served a purpose similar to what the complex trait does now
2) Each intermediate step along the way was adaptive and selected for but served a different purpose and were co-opted to serve a new purpose in the complex trait (ex. eyeballs)

Question 21

Gene Sharing and Duplication

Answer 21

protein serving one function is recruited to serve another function elsewhere. Often facilitated by Gene Duplication

Question 22

Constraints to Evolution

Answer 22

1) Genetic variation – without it natural selection is useless.
2) Gene constraints – Genes may be constrained by other processes they contribute to.
3) Gene flow – Outlining populations may not be able to locally adapt if gene flow is continuous
4) Physical constraints
5) The environment and evolutionary arms race
6) natural selection lacks foresight

Question 23

Natural Selection

Answer 23

Genetic mutations change the phenotype which increase or decrease the fitness

Question 24

Natural Selection: What are the 3 steps?

Answer 24

1) Variation – Individuals in a population differ
2) Inheritance – Some of these differences are inherited by offspring from their parents.
3) Differential Reproductive Success – Individuals with certain traits are more successful than others at surviving and reproducing on their environment

Question 25

Uniformitarianism

Answer 25

current geological processes taking place now are the ones that sculpted Earth.

Question 26

Aristotle

Answer 26

1) Methodological Naturalism --First to think the earth from a natural perspective, coming up with hypotheses about the Sun, Moon and Stars. But he didn't test hypotheses very well. 2) scala naturae -- an unbroken chain of increasing complexity in animals. This had to the Origin of Life question - Spontaneous Generation

Question 27

Lyell

Answer 27

1) Lyell saw the world change and was much older than people thought. 2) He gave us uniformitarianism vs. catastrophism (Earth and life are old) 3) Relative Dating; 5 assumptions: - Principle of superposition -- young over old (oldest rock layers at the bottom) - Principle of horizontality -- Non horizontality happened secondarily (mountains formed second) - Principle of cross cutting relationships -- Rocks in seams are younger - Principle of inclusions -- Boulders etc. found in a body of rock are older than the rock they are in - Principle of faunal succession -- Early fossils are more simple, recent are most like existing (fossile time clock)

Question 28

E. Darwin

Answer 28

1) Theory of evolution change from his book Zoonomia. Life from a single living filament, long time frame to all life, humans from primates, struggle for existence. 2) Two failures; - He did not connect that the struggle for existence caused evolutionary change - Acquired traits are passed on (Lamarck)

Question 29

Lamarck

Answer 29

1) Came up with the Inheritance of acquired characteristics theory - First theory of transformation and adaptation of species (modern mussels vs. fossil mussels)

Question 30

C. Darwin

Answer 30

1) Two fundamental insights: 1.the environment selects on variation of traits of individual organisms, successful variants reproduce; natural selection 2. Common ancestry of organisms 2) On the origin of Species is the first work to give complete theory of evolution by natural selection, and one with mountains of evidence

Question 31

Darwin's Finches

Answer 31

Descent with Modification leading to speciation in Finches; all these different finches came from one ancestral line of finch

Question 32

Wallace's Line

Answer 32

A line drawn by Wallace across Indonesia showing which islands came from Australia (from a plate moving up) or Asia (from a plate moving down); using Biology and Phylogeny (faunal boundary)

Question 33

Pigeons!

Answer 33

Overtime we can change some traits by selective breeding (artificial selection). Natural selection is just like artificial selection but it includes the whole organism.

Question 34

California Brassica rapa

Answer 34

Showing evolution did not change the plants, but the plants had a lot of variation in them, so when the drought occurred in 2004, it caused a shift in the average date of flowering because those that flowered after the early drought ended up dying without reproducing.

Question 35

Flowers and the Reaction Norm

Answer 35

Phenotypic plasticity. All different genotypes planted at different elevations, they cause those different genotypes to react different to the environment (the amount of growth).

Question 36

Oldfield Mice

Answer 36

Experienced variation in coat color, the variation was heritable, and it does have fitness consequences (light mice and dark mice fitting/ not blending into their environment).

Question 37

Guppies being eaten in small pools in Trinidad

Answer 37

Tradeoffs: 1) Guppies in low-predation sites produced fewer but larger offspring because their predator eats them when they're very small. 2) Guppies in high-predation sites produced many small offspring because their predator eats them at all sizes.

Question 38

10,000 generations of Bacteria

Answer 38

Natural Selection: Some of the strains had random mutations that caused them to differ from the other strains (some were better than others). This shows that they had variation, their traits were inheritable, and that they had differential reproductive success (had tradeoffs).

Question 39

Mollusk eyes

Answer 39

This is an example of eye evolution in parallel. A mollusk eye evolved into a more complex trait as time went on.

Question 40

Tree Hoppers

Answer 40

Their "helmet" originally came from a third pair of ancestral wings has been co-opted to serve as camouflage (for defense rather than flight).

Question 41

Skull Sutures and Feathers

Answer 41

These sutures were co-opted to evolve for live births in birds, reptiles, and mammals, but reptiles no longer gave live birth. This is an example of exaptation (complex traits). The same goes for the feathers, since they were for thermoregulation, shielding from sunlight, etc. rather than flight.

Question 42

Examples of Natural selection constraints

Answer 42

1) Physical constraints - The owl needing good depth perception since it is nocturnal, while a prey animal like an ostrich needs to peripheral sight to see its surroundings. 2) The environment and evolutionary arms race - Host/pathogen interactions; since one can affect the selective conditions of the other 3) Lacks foresight - an old beat-up car cannot magically transform into a high-performance sports car.