Exam One Flashcards
What are the 8 fundamental properties of life?
- Chemical Uniqueness
- Complexity and Hierarchical Organization
- Reproduction
- Possession of a Genetic Program
- Metabolism
- Development
- Environmental Interaction
- Movement
Give an example for each fundamental property 1-4.
- Chemical Uniqueness - nucleotides to nucleic acids
- Complexity and Hierarchical Organization - an individual muscle cell cannot contract, but muscle tissue can
- Reproduction - cells divide producing new cells
- Possession of a genetic program - nucleic acids encode the structures of the protein molecules
Give an example of each fundamental property 5-8.
- Metabolism - digestion and cellular respiration
- Development - the human life cycle
- Environmental Stimuli - moving toward (or away from) light
- Movement - enzymes change shape
What is emergence?
Each level has properties that are greater than the sum of its parts.
What is used by living systems today that arose early in the history of evolutionary life?
The most fundamental chemical processes.
What is irritability?
The property that says that all organisms respond to environmental stimuli (their environments)
What is ecology?
The study of organismal interaction with the environment.
Why is movement one of the fundamental properties of life?
Because living systems and their parts show precise and controlled movements that arise from within the system.
Why is metabolism one of the fundamental properties of life?
Because living things must acquire nutrients from the environment to maintain themselves.
What is NASA’s definition of life?
basically it boils down to self reproduction capable of variation
What are the three major features unique to the animal’s branch of the evolutionary tree of life?
- All animals are heterotrophic, which means they are not capable of making their own food and rely on external food sources. Because of this the supermajority of animals have an internal microbiome.
- All animals are eukaryotic, and therefore have a membrane bound nucleus.
- All animal cells lack cell walls
Why can Euglena not be considered animal or a plant?
They contain chloroplasts but they also have no cell wall
Explain how science consists of testing, possibly rejecting, and improving our simplest and best explanations using data “NOT in proving the correctness of a conjecture.”
Using the scientific method we first must generate a hypothesis, an educated guess per say, in a form that is “falsifiable” and “testable”. Then, in order to determine whether or not the hypothesis is refuted or supported tests are designed and performed. Because of this, scientists DO NOT use words like prove, correct or true, because there could always be new data that contradicts your hypothesis. In addition, because science is always falsifiable, explanations are constantly refined, which in turn, improves even the most simple and best explanations.
What are the steps of the scientific method?
- Observation
- Question
- Hypothesis Formation
- Make prediction based on hypothesis
- Empirical test
- Conclusions
- Publication
Explain the first major conjecture of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
- Perpetual Change - the living world is neither constant or cycling, but always changing.
Ex. Organisms change from generation to generation.
Ex. Further supported by molecular / DNA evidence
Explain the second major conjecture of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
- Common Descent - all forms of life arose from a common ancestor, through branching of lineages.
Explain the third major conjecture of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
- Multiplication of species - the evolutionary process produces new species by splitting and transforming older ones
Explain the fourth major conjecture of Darwins’s evolutionary theory.
- Gradualism - large differences in anatomic traits that categorize much different species originate from tiny changes over very long periods of time.
Explain the fifth major conjecture of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
- Natural Selection - process that generates new forms from small variations called adaptations
-an adaptation is any structure, process, or trait that improves an organisms fitness
What were the roles of Mendelian genetics and the chromosomal theory of inheritance in aiding Darwin’s original theory?
Darwin had a major obstacle in his theory, it lacked a successful theory of heredity. Then Gregor Mendel, as we all know based on his thousands of generations of different organisms, deduced the laws of Mendelian Genetics. Later, the chromosomal theory of inheritance posited that the inherited information was concentrated as genes on chromosomes. It also discovered that diploid individuals have two sets of the same gene, and during gamete production the two genes separate creating a haploid. When fertilization occurs, the offspring will receive one copy from each parent. With this new information, Neo-Darwinism arose which modified Darwin’s theory by incorporating the new data.
Give a explanation of taxonomy and what it is used for.
Taxonomy is a formal system that names and classifies species by following the principle of common decent.
To do this biologists have organized animal diversity based on shared features.
What are the eight taxonomic classifications and what are they individually called?
Did King Philip Come Over For Green Spinach
Taxons
1. Domain
2. Kingdom
3. Phylum
4. Class
5. Order
6. Family
7. Genus
8. Species
What is systematics and what is it used for?
Systematics is the wider science of classifying organisms based on studies of variation in populations that give insight to their evolutionary relationships.
What is classification?
Process of placing organisms into classes and groups
What is an essence?
common feature which is used to define a group.
What is systemization?
The process of placing groups of species into units of common evolutionary decent.
Why is Carolus Linnaeus’ s system of classification important to Taxonomy?
Because he used morphology to develop a classification system that grouped species based on essence into genus and so on, the basic principle is used today, although heavily altered.
What is binomial nomenclature, and how is it applied?
It was Linnaeus’ system for naming different species.
The entire (genus and species) is in italics or underlined, and the Genus is capitalized and the species is lower case.
All other taxon are only capitalized, not italicized
Ex. “Homo sapien”
What is the goal of systematics and how is it accomplished?
The major goal is to infer the evolutionary tree that relates all extant and extinct species.
What is homology?
similar characters resulting from common ancestry
examples include the limbs of tetrapods (four parts)
What is an analogy?
character similarity with different evolutionary origins
What is the ancestral character?
the character state (trait) or variant that was present in the common ancestor of the entire group
What is a evolutionary derived character?
Any trait that differs from its ancestral form
What is monophyletic group?
A group in phylogeny that contains all the descendants of a particular ancestor and no other organism.
“one cut” “goal of systematics”
What is a paraphyletic group?
A group in phylogeny that contains some but not all of the descendants of a particular ancestor.
What is a polyphyletic group?
A group that consists of members that do not share the same common ancestor
What is an outgroup in phylogeny?
It is a group or species rather that is phylogenetically close but not within the group that is being studied
Why would we compare something against the outgroup?
To say that that certain species under consideration have derived character traits (polarity) we must compare them to the outgroup.
Any character trait found in the outgroup should be termed what?
ancestoral
All character traits found in the study group, but not the outgroup are termed what?
derived
How does a hypothesis attain the level of a theory?
It must be very powerful in explaining a wide variety of related phenomenon
What were Lamarckism contributions?
He proposed the mechanism of inheritance of acquired characteristics
Because organisms strive to meet demands of the environment, organisms acquire adaptations individually and pass them on
What is uniformitarianism and who established it?
The laws of physics and chemistry have not changed throughout the history of the earth, and geological events are natural processes similar to what we see today.
Established by Charles Lyell
What major conclusion did Lyell make about rock formation?
That measures of rock formation are much too slow for the earth to be a few thousand years old, rather it should be measured in hundreds of thousands or millions of years
What did Malthus say?
Given enough resources populations will exponentially growth
In actuality, populations grow logistically until the carrying capacity is met
When resources start to deplete, individuals will inevitably die
How did Lyell’s readings that Darwin read on his voyage affect Darwin’s thoughts?
Darwin realized that concrete laws of physics and chemistry along with his new understandings about the possible age of the earth supported his developing theory of evolution.
What did Darwin realize after he read Malthus?
That the process of selection in nature could be a powerful force in evolution.
What is the main premise in darwinian evolution?
Perpetual Change
What are the three characteristics that show the clearest trends in horse evolution which was capable with Darwin’s theory?
- Tendency to increase in size
- Reduction of toes to hooves
- Elaboration of molars
Why did Darwin propose homology as major evidence for common descent?
Because if two or more species share a unique physical feature, they may have all inherited this feature from a common ancestor.