EXAM 1

Question 1

Together with Charles Darwin, this scientist is best known for independently developing the theory of evolution by natural selection

Answer 1

Alfred Wallace

Question 2

How did Jean Baptiste Lamarck envision the evolutionary process

Answer 2

Traits acquired during an individuals lifetime can be passed on to their offspring and change the population

Question 3

Which of these is an example of homologous traits

Answer 3

T rex arms and bird wings

Question 4

Darwin would’ve understood each of the following while developing his theory of evolution, except

Answer 4

A mechanistic understanding of the genetic basis of inheritance

Question 5

The hind spur on an anaconda (snake) is an example of a

Answer 5

vestigial organ

Question 6

The relationship between the hind limbs and a whale is most like

Answer 6

The relationship between GULO and great apes

Question 7

Why does the path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve support evolution by natural selection

Answer 7

Its path is best explained by homology among organisms

Question 8

Endogenous retroviruses provide strong evidence for common ancestry because

Answer 8

Their placement in the genome is an unpredictable and meaningless accident that nevertheless gets inherited among distantly related species

Question 9

Which of the following occurred most recently

Answer 9

The evolution of eukaryotes

Question 10

The end Permian extinction (252 mya) was the last time that _____ was observed in the fossil record

Answer 10

trilobites

Question 11

Go back to 70 mya. If you were to find the ancestors of humans living at this time, it would most likely have which of the following traits

Answer 11

Keratinized hair

Question 12

What unites the major transitions of evolution

Answer 12

They are evolutionary transitions where the individual identity of an organism transitioned to a higher level of organization

Question 13

Which of the following is not true about phylogenies

Answer 13

Phylogenies inferred using parsimony use distances measured by counting all differences between species

Question 14

Shared derived characters help us identify

Answer 14

Monophyletic groups

Question 15

Whales are not fish, what provides evidence of this

Answer 15

Whales and other mammals produce milk

Question 16

A researcher has a set of 10 species. They want to infer the phylogeny, so they count up the number of differences in the species DNA and generate a phylogenetic hypothesis that fits best with the observed pattern of differences. What approach to phylogeny inference are they using

Answer 16

Distance-matrix methods

Question 17

What is a drawback to distance-matrix methods

Answer 17

It doesn’t make use of all of the info in the dataset because it reduces similarity number to one.
It treats all changes equally, regardless of whether they are easy or hard to evolve.
It doesn’t consider which traits are ancestral and which are derived

Question 18

Phylogenies used to be estimated using primarily morphological data. However, with the advent of DNA sequencing technology, we have seen a whole new way to reconstruct phylogeny. These methods have resulted in what

Answer 18

Most of the time, DNA reinforces and supports existing hypotheses of evolutionary relationships
DNA sometimes overturns relationships we didn’t expect before and requires changing the taxonomy of organisms
DNA evidence showed that the most closely related viral strains to SARs-COV-2 that we currently know of is from bats found in Laos

Question 19

Which of the following are true regarding evolution as it relates to Darwin’s four postulates

Answer 19

They describe the conditions that evolution will occur by natural selection
They do not depend on biology, but are mathematical truths
Heritable variation is an essential ingredient to evolution by natural selection

Question 20

Which of the following is the correct way to understand evolutionary fitness

Answer 20

Fitness only has meaning in a specific environment with respect to a trait