Evolution and Origins Flashcards
Who used the Bible to determine that the earth began in 4004BC?
James Ussher
What is the fixity of species concept?
Species are permanent natural kinds that do not change.
How old actually is the Earth?
4,500,000,000 years old
What is ontogeny?
The fact that the early developmental stages of distantly related organisms is similar.
Who founded gradualism and what is it?
Hutton
Gradualism is the idea that profound changes are the result of small changes over time.
Who founded catastrophism and what is it?
Cuvier
Catastrophism is the idea that reccurent catastrophic events cause widespread extinction and result in sharp boundaries between fossil layers.
Who founded uniformitarism and what is it?
Lyell
Uniformitarism is the idea that the same processes we see today also acted in the past.
What did Lord Kelvin argue?
That the rate of cooling of the Earth suggested that the Earth is 98 million years old.
What is the underlying theme of biogeography?
The same environment can yield different organisms.
What concept did Alfred Wegner put forward in 1912?
Continental drift
Discuss the randomness of natural selection.
Non-random survival of random variation.
What are the three conditions of natural selection that must be fulfilled?
Variation
Differential selection
Inheritence
What is sexual selection?
Individuals with particular desirable traits are more likely to mate - not random.
What is the founder effect?
When a small group establishes a new population within a different gene pool.
What is the bottleneck effect?
When a small group of the population that survives is no longer representative after the original population.
