Lecture 1: Studying Life Flashcards
What is life?
An organized genetic unit capable of metabolism, reproduction, and evolution.
What is metabolism?
A cell’s/organism’s total chemical activity, consisting of thousands of individual chemical reactions.
What is homeostasis?
The maintenance of a relatively stable internal condition (ex., temperature).
What is reproduction?
A process by which an individual cell/organism makes a new individual cell/organism.
What results from reproduction with variation?
Biological evolution.
What are adaptations?
Differences among living things that enable them to live in different kinds of environments and adopt different lifestyles.
What is sexual reproduction?
The combining of genetic information from two cells.
True or False: Sexual reproduction increases the rate of evolution.
True.
What is the theory of evolution by natural selection?
Differences or variations among individuals influence how well those individuals survive and reproduce in changing environments.
What is natural selection?
The differential survival and reproductive success of individuals.
What is artificial selection?
Selective breeding.
What led to the appearance of life about 4 billion years ago?
Chemical evolution.
What are prokaryotic cells?
The first cells that arose around 3.8 billion years ago, “first nut”.
What significant ability did cyanobacteria acquire about 2.5 billion years ago?
The ability to photosynthesize.
What is the significance of ozone accumulation in the upper atmosphere? How did this affect evolution?
It prevents excess UV light from reaching Earth. Before the ozone layer life existed underwater only because it was too dangerous for organisms.
What are eukaryotic cells?
Cells that have surviving smaller prokaryotic cells within them, appearing about 1.5 billion years ago.
What is the Tree of Life?
A provisional diagram showing how all organisms on Earth descended from an original unicellular organism.
What are the three major domains of life?
1) Bacteria
2) Archaea
3) Eukarya
What is a binomial?
A distinct scientific name for a species, consisting of the genus name and specific epithet.
What are the five main parts of the scientific method?
1) Making observations
2) Asking questions
3) Forming hypotheses
5) Making predictions
6) Testing the predictions
What happens if results support a hypothesis?
The hypothesis may come to be considered a theory.
What is a controlled experiment?
An experiment that manipulates a single variable and compares results with an un-manipulated control group.
What is an independent variable?
The variable being manipulated in an experiment.
What is a dependent variable?
The response that is measured in an experiment.
