Chapter 1: Evolutionary Biology: The Evolution of Evolutionary History

Question 1

• Darwin’s __ is one of the most revolutionary ideas in Western thought.
• It was rivaled only by __ and __ theories of physics.
• It profoundly challenged the prevailing worldview, which had originated largely with __ and __, who developed the notion that species have fixed properties.

Answer 1

• theory of biological evolution
• Newton’s; Einstein’s
• Plato; Aristotle

Question 2

Christians interpreted the biblical account of Genesis literally and concluded that each species had been created individually by God in the same form it has today.

Answer 2

Special Creation

Question 3

the scale, or ladder, of nature: permanent and unchanging.

Answer 3

“Great Chain of Being” or scala naturae

Question 4

Established the framework of modern taxonomy in his Systema Naturae (1735)

Answer 4

Carolus Linnaeus

Question 5

won worldwide fame for his exhaustive classification of plants and animals, undertaken in the hope of discovering the pattern of the creation.

Answer 5

Systema Naturae (1735) of Carolus Linnaeus

Question 6

Linnaeus classified “related” species into __, “related” __ into __, and so on. To him, “relatedness” meant propinquity in the Creator’s design.

Answer 6

• genera; genera
• orders

Question 7

a philosophical movement, largely inspired by Newton’s explanations of physical phenomena, adopted reason as the major basis of authority and marked the emergence of science.

Answer 7

Enlightenment (18th Century)

Question 8

Geologists who expounded the principle of uniformitarianism

Answer 8

James Hutton and Charles Lyell

Question 9

• that the present is the key to the past.
• holding that the same processes operated in the past as in the present and that the data of geology should therefore be explained by causes that we can now observe.

Answer 9

principle of uniformitarianism

Question 10

Proposed the most significant pre-Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis in his Philosophie Zoologique (1809)

Answer 10

Chevalier de Lamarck (18th Century)

Question 11

• Lamarck hypothesized that different organisms originated separately by __ from nonliving matter, starting at the bottom of the chain of being.
• A __ acts within each species, he said, causing it to progress up the chain. Species originated at different times, so we now see a hierarchy of species because they differ in age

Answer 11

• spontaneous generation
• “nervous fluid”

Question 12

__ argued that species differ from one another because they have different needs, and so use certain of their organs and appendages more than others.

Answer 12

Chevalier de Lamarck (18th Century)

Question 13

What principle: alterations, acquired during an individual’s lifetime, are inherited

Answer 13

Inheritance of acquired characteristics

Question 14

the theory of evolution where the principle of inheritance of acquired characteristics is based on

Answer 14

Lamarckism

Question 15

organisms altered their behavior in response to environmental change. Their changed behavior, in turn, modified their organs, and their offspring inherited those “improved” structures.

Answer 15

Lamarck’s Theory of Evolution

Question 16

The son of an English physician. He briefly studied medicine in Edinburgh, then turned to studying for a career in the clergy at Cambridge University.

Answer 16

Charles Darwin

Question 17

In 1831, at the age of 22, Charles Darwin was invited to serve as a __ and __ on the British Navy ship H.M.S. __, tasked with charting the coast of South America.

Answer 17

• naturalist
• captain’s companion
• Beagle

Question 18

The ornithologist pointed out that Darwin’s specimens of mockingbirds from the Galápagos Islands were so different from one island to another that they represented different species

Answer 18

John Gould

Question 19

argued that the rate of human population growth is greater than the rate of increase in the food supply so unchecked growth must lead to famine.

Answer 19

Thomas Malthus

Question 20

Thomas Malthus essay was the inspiration for Darwin’s great idea, one of the most important ideas in the history of thought: __.

Answer 20

natural selection

Question 21

Was collecting specimens in the Malay Archipelago, had independently conceived of natural selection

Answer 21

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913)

Question 22

made significant further contributions to biology, especially about biogeography, the geographic distribution of species.

Answer 22

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913)

Question 23

Charles Darwin’s major work published in 1859

Answer 23

On the Origin of Species

Question 24

Charles Darwin’s major work, On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, contains two major hypotheses:

Answer 24

1) first, all organisms have descended, with modification, from common ancestral forms of life, and
2) second, that the chief agent of modification is natural selection.

Question 25

Organisms that are more adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and pass on the genes that aided their success. This process causes species to change and diverge over time.

Answer 25

Natural selection

Question 26

Unlike Lamarck’s __, in which individual organisms change, Darwin’s is a __, in which the frequency of a variant form (i.e., the proportion of individuals with that variant feature) increases within a population from generation to generation

Answer 26

• transformational theory
• variational theory of change

Question 27

Theory of evolution provided a new framework for exploring and interpreting the history and diversification of life, a project that was especially promoted by the German zoologist __.

Answer 27

Ernst Haeckel

Question 28

For about __ years after the publication of The Origin of Species, all but a few faithful Darwinians rejected natural selection, and numerous theories were proposed in its stead. These theories included neo-Lamarckian, orthogenetic, and mutationist theories

Answer 28

• 60

Question 29

__ includes several theories based on the old idea of inheritance of modifications acquired during an organism’s lifetime.

Answer 29

Neo-Lamarckism

Question 30

• German biologist
• Experiment: cut off the tails of mice for many generations and showed that this mutilation did not affect the tail length of their descendants.

Answer 30

August Weismann

Question 31

What theory: the variation that arises is directed toward fixed goals, so that a species evolves in a predetermined direction by some kind of internal drive, without the aid of natural selection.

Answer 31

theories of orthogenesis, or “straight-line evolution”

Question 32

a theory: were advanced by some geneticists who observed that discretely different new phenotypes can arise by a process of mutation.

Answer 32

Mutationist theories

Question 33

A theory: supposed that such mutant forms constituted new species and thus believed that natural selection was not necessary to account for the origin of species.

Answer 33

Mutationist theory

Question 34

• The last influential mutationist
• an accomplished geneticist who nevertheless erroneously argued that the origin of new species and higher taxa is entirely different in kind from evolutionary change within species.

Answer 34

Richard Goldschmidt

Question 35

• anti-Darwinian ideas
• chief principle: that adaptive evolution is caused by natural selection acting on particulate (Mendelian) genetic variation

Answer 35

evolutionary synthesis or modern synthesis
(or neo-Darwinism)

Question 36

developed a mathematical theory of population genetics, which showed that mutation and natural selection together cause adaptive evolution: mutation is not an alternative to natural selection but is rather its raw material.

Answer 36

Ronald A. Fisher and John B. S. Haldane (Evolutionary synthesis)

Question 37

Pioneered the study of genetic variation and change in natural populations, continued by __

Answer 37

• Sergei Chetverikov
• Theodosius Dobzhansky

Question 38

conveyed the ideas of the population geneticists to other biologists, thus influencing their appreciation of the genetic basis of evolution.

Answer 38

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Question 39

mutation, gene flow or migration, natural selection, and genetic drift are the major causes of evolution within species (which Dobzhansky
called __)

Answer 39

• microevolution

Question 40

the evolution of the major alterations that distinguish higher taxa (genera, families, orders, and classes).

Answer 40

macroevolution

Question 41

established the structure of DNA in 1953, advances in genetics, molecular biology, and molecular and information technology have revolutionized the study of evolution.

Answer 41

James Watson and Francis Crick

Question 42

• Developed neutral theory of molecular evolution
• argued that most of the evolution of DNA sequences occurs by chance (genetic drift) rather than by natural selection.

Answer 42

Motoo Kimura