EXAM 1 Flashcards
Together with Charles Darwin, this scientist is best known for independently developing the theory of evolution by natural selection
Alfred Wallace
How did Jean Baptiste Lamarck envision the evolutionary process
Traits acquired during an individuals lifetime can be passed on to their offspring and change the population
Which of these is an example of homologous traits
T rex arms and bird wings
Darwin would’ve understood each of the following while developing his theory of evolution, except
A mechanistic understanding of the genetic basis of inheritance
The hind spur on an anaconda (snake) is an example of a
vestigial organ
The relationship between the hind limbs and a whale is most like
The relationship between GULO and great apes
Why does the path of the recurrent laryngeal nerve support evolution by natural selection
Its path is best explained by homology among organisms
Endogenous retroviruses provide strong evidence for common ancestry because
Their placement in the genome is an unpredictable and meaningless accident that nevertheless gets inherited among distantly related species
Which of the following occurred most recently
The evolution of eukaryotes
The end Permian extinction (252 mya) was the last time that _____ was observed in the fossil record
trilobites
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
Keratinized hair
What unites the major transitions of evolution
They are evolutionary transitions where the individual identity of an organism transitioned to a higher level of organization
Which of the following is not true about phylogenies
Phylogenies inferred using parsimony use distances measured by counting all differences between species
Shared derived characters help us identify
Monophyletic groups
Whales are not fish, what provides evidence of this
Whales and other mammals produce milk
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
Distance-matrix methods
What is a drawback to distance-matrix methods
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
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
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
Which of the following are true regarding evolution as it relates to Darwin’s four postulates
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
Which of the following is the correct way to understand evolutionary fitness
Fitness only has meaning in a specific environment with respect to a trait
