Introduction to Evolution Flashcards
the progressive change of organisms as they descend from ancestral species-is a fact. By now, the evidence for it is overwhelming and ubiquitous
Evolution
The existence of evolution has been proposed several times in history. For instance, an ancient Greek scientist that proposed a theory of evolution was named
Anaximander
When was evolution first advanced proposed
Late 1700s early 1880s
Name two reasons why evolution remained controversial for a long time
1) It ran contrary to contemporary religious ideas
2) No mechanism for evolution was known
The first plausible, widely accepted mechanism for evolutionary change by natural selection was proposed by….
Darwin and Wallace
Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution is well tested and supported by hundreds of scientific investigations, are aspects of it falsifiable?
Yes, some have been successfully challenged and others supported, just like other mechanisms of evolution as well.
a retrovirus of enormous medical concern. Because of evolutionary studies, we know that two separate lineages of this retrovirus passed into the human population from African Apes in the mid 20th century.
HIV
This knowledge has alerted us to the danger of emergent diseases from other animal hosts, a reason for our concern about SARS and bird flu.
AHHHH!
Our understanding of ______ enabled us to develop a therapy for HIV
Evolutionary Biology
By using three drugs simultaneously, we subvert the evolution of the virus…evolving resistance to one drug means loosing resistance to another. What is this method of HIV treatment called?
Triple-therapy
an evolutionary phenomenon of tremendous clinical significance involving medicine evolved by fungi (like penicillin) over millions of years to kill off their bacterial predators and resistance to it
Antibiotic Resistance
Since the ____th century, the bacterial pathogens have evolved resistance to our antibiotics, because extensive use of these drugs has caused very strong natural selection in favor of mutations which favor antibiotic resistance.
20th Century
Strains of this bacterial pathogen have evolved resistance to penicillins, tetracyclines, spectinomycin and floroquinolones.
Neisseria Gonorrheae
Scientific understanding of evolution came out of its infancy in 1859, when theories of _____ by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace became widely known
Evolution by natural selection .
We now know of other mechanisms of evolution, including ____ and ______, but natural selection is the only mechanism capable of producing adaptation.
Genetic Drift and Mutation
Was natural selection immediately accepted?
Which decade were Darwin’s ideas synthesized with a modern understanding of genetics for widespread acceptance?
No
1930’s
Linnaeus and Taxonomy Malthus and the Principle of Population Lyell and Uniformitarianism Lamarck and the fist comprehensive theory of evolution The Voyage of the Beagle Wallace and Darwin
Intellectual Stepping stones to developing a theory of evolution
the branch of biology concerned with naming and classifying living things.
Taxonomy
The Swedish Physician and Botanist that founded the science of taxonomy, he developed the two part system of binomial nomenclature used today
Carolus Linnaeus
Carolus Linnaeus did not believe in evolution by descent, the taxonomic system suggests some mechanism by which different forms of life are related to each other as a series of diverging, heirarchial, branches.
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an eighteenth century economist, published “An Essay on the Principle of Population” in 1798.
Thomas Malthus
What two things did the essay on the principle of population imply?
People have more children than can possibly survive
Human populations are kept in check by famine, starvation, and disease
Darwin added what to Malthus’s theory
EVERY species has more offspring than can be expected to survive
Why was Archbishop James Usher’s calculation of the birthof the earth as 4040 BC based upon the Old Testament wrong?
It left little time for slow, gradual processes like evolution
When was the age of the Earth determined?
Did ideas vary greatly?
19th century
Yes
Geologist and physician that proposed that it was possible to explain geological land formations by processes that are currently in operation, like erosion and sedimentation
James Hutton
Canyons were cut by the erosion of streams, layers of sediment were deposited at the edge of river deltas, these processes occurred slowly over a very long time-this idea was called
Gradualism
uthe idea that geological processes in operation now operated similarly in the past, at about the same rate.
Uniformitarianism
English geologist that was a contemporary of Darwin’s who was a proponent of Hutton’s and went a bit farther by proposing uniformitarianism
Charles Lyell
developed the first comprehensive model of evolution, a French Zoologist and curator of the invertabrae collection at the Paris museum
Jean Baptiste de Lamarck
Lamarck saw many different lines of descent among the fossil invertebrates he encountered: instead of Aristotle’s single scala natura, there were many.
He proposed that organisms increased in complexity through time because of an innate tendency
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He proposed that interactions of organisms and environment drove the process of evolution.
Jean Baptiste de Lamarck
He followed the widely accepted notion that characteristics acquired during an individual’s lifetime could be passed to one’s offspring.
He proposed that patterns of use and disuse drove the evolution of adaptations. In stretching their necks to reach leaves high in the treetop, giraffes acquired slightly longer necks, and passed these longer necks to their offspring.
Jean Baptiste de Lamarck
According to him, every organism was continually striving for greater complexity, a clam strove to be a better clam, etc.
Jean Baptiste de Lamarck
Can Lamarckian evolution be disproved by experiment?
Yes
we now know that acquired characters cannot be passed to offspring, also, evolution carries no innate tendency toward increasing complexity, but Lamarck’s theory was an important prelude to Darwin’s, it opened the door to thinking that organisms can and do change over the course of time.