Practice Final Qs

Question 1

According to Paracelsus’ opening lecture in Basel, what substance contained the greatest secret in medicine?

a. blood
b. bile
c. alcohol
d. excrement
e. laudanum

Answer 1

d - excrement

Question 2

Leeuwonhoek was more successful than other microscopists of his time mostly due to:

a. worked better with microscopes

b. held a secure position at a university allowing him to pursue his work

c. his wife collaborated with him and did most of his illustrations for his submissions to the Royal Society

d. he received an annual gov grant to do his work

e. his network of friends brought him interesting things to look at

Answer 2

a - worked well with microscopes

Question 3

Joseph Black believed that the substance given off by combustion is

a. foul air
b. fixed air (CO2)
c. spiritus sylvester
d. phlogiston
e. fire air

Answer 3

b - fixed air

Question 4

Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) objected to Darwinian evolution because he thought:

a. organisms do not evolve at all

b. mutation was rarer than Darwin believed

c. he favoured Lamarck’s mechanisms for evolutionary change over Darwin’s

d. the solar system was too young for natural selection to have produced the biodiversity on earth

e. organisms change over time, but did not accept from common descent

Answer 4

d - the solar system is too young for natural selection to be the cause

Question 5

The principle of superimposition was an essential part of the view of geology of:

a. William Whiston
b. Neptunists
c. Benoit de Maillet
d. James Ussher
e. Buffon

Answer 5

b - Neptunists

Question 6

Robert Hooke:

a. collaborated with Fabrici in his map of venous valves

b. completed William Harvey’s model of blood circulation

c. discovered the function of the liver

d. published drawings of, and named, cells

e. discovered arsenic

Answer 6

d - published drawings of and named cells

Question 7

How many plants did each of the ancient botanists Theophastrus and Dioscorides describe?

a. 50
b. 500
c. 5000
d. 10,000
e. 20,000

Answer 7

b - 500

Question 8

In what ways did Buffon’s view of history of life have directionality?

a. organisms are constantly becoming more complex

b. organisms are constantly adapting to lower temperatures as Earth cools

c. organisms are constantly becoming simpler

d. the interior moulds of organisms were constantly making abrupt shifts to new ones, creating new species

e. new species arise continuously via hybridization

Answer 8

b - organisms constantly adapting to cooler temperatures as Earth cools

Question 9

Why did Darwin hurry his work into publication during 1858-9?

a. he had a terminal illness and wanted to publish before dying

b. he had discovered the principle of natural selection and was excited

c. the public was excited for his ideas

d. he had OCD and once he got ahold of the idea of evolution, he could not die until he was finished

e. he learned that someone else was working along the same lines

Answer 9

e - someone else was working along the same lines

Question 10

Gregor Mendel’s work with peas suggested that:

a. some hereditary determinants seem to disappear in some generations, but can reappear in others, unaltered

b. hereditary determinants blend upon hybridization, giving offspring that are intermediates of parents

c. genes are not on chromosomes

d. inheritance in flowering plants occurs by very different rules than in animals

e. peas are interesting plants, but not typical

Answer 10

a - hereditary determinants seem to skip a generation but can reappear unaltered in another generation

(he wasn’t talking about skipping generations, but more about the fact that just because a phenotype isn’t expressed, doesn’t mean it’s allele is lost from the genome)

Question 11

What features of Linnaeus’ system had most significant applications for evolutionary thought?

a. standardized nomenclature

b. naturalness of all its groupings

c. all-encompassing embrace of biodiversity

d. emphasis on classification by sexual parts

e. nested, hierarchical arrangement of organisms

Answer 11

e - nested, hierarchical arrangement

Question 12

What actually is phlogiston, in reality?

a. oxygen
b. CO2
c. water vapour
d. heat
e. it isn’t anything, it doesn’t exist

Answer 12

e - it never existed

Question 13

the discovery of photosynthesis by Ingen-Housz consisted of:

a. evidence that plants produce dephlogisticated air in the dark, but not in the light

b. proof that plants release phlogiston in the light, but not in the dark

c. demonstrated that plants restore the health of ‘injured air’ but only in sunlight

d. proof that plants transform air and water into sugar

e. showed that light induced plants to take up water through their roots

Answer 13

c - plants restore injured air but only in SUNLIGHT (key progression from previous experiments)

Question 14

From an idea suggested in the 1890s, Charles Darwin was taken aboard the Beagle not as ship naturalist, but as _______

a. the ship’s minister
b. the captain’s social companion
c. navigator
d. ship’s surgeon
e. expedition historian

Answer 14

b - social companion

Question 15

August Weismann moved the study of inheritance forward by

a. tutoring Mendel when he was a student

b. discovering chromosomes

c. discovering DNA

d. distinguishing btw germplasm and somatoplasm in animals

e. inventing genetic maps

Answer 15

d - distinguished germplasm from somatoplasm in animals

Question 16

WHich organism was Thomas Hunt Morgan’s most important genetics work done on?

a. fruit flies
b. corn
c. mice
d. bacteria
e. peas

Answer 16

a - fruit flies

Question 17

Patrick Matthew’s views on evolution closely resembled:

a. Darwin’s concept of natural selection

b. Lamarck’s model of inherent drive to complexity

c. Robert Chamber’s embryological hypothesis

d. Buffon’s limited range of evolutionary adaptation

e. Cuvier’s catastrophism and relevance to changing biota over time

Answer 17

a - Darwin’s natural selection

Question 18

What is an example of the supposed maternal impression phenomenon?

a. pregnant woman drinking too much and birthing a fetal alcohol syndrome child

b. pregnant woman listening to a lot of piano music and having a child who is a gifted musician

c. a daughter than looks like her mother

d. a son who likes like his mother

e. a child picking up language from its mother, regardless of no systematic instructions

Answer 18

b - piano

Question 19

Erasmus Darwin suspected that

a. life had not evolved throughout history but would begin to in the future

b. the flood of Genesis wiped out useful fossil traces

c. existence of the duck-bill platypus disproved the possibility of evolution

d. animal life evolved from a single common ancestor

e. natural selection was responsible for evolutionary change

Answer 19

d - animal life evolved from a single common ancestor

Question 20

What did Modern Synthesis synthesize?

a. cell theory and biochemistry

b. Mendelian genetics and biochemistry

c. Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics

d. biological systems and cell theory

e. Lamarckian evolution and Darwinian evolution

Answer 20

c - Darwinian evolution with Mendelian genetics

Question 21

Hugo de Vries’ mutation theory was intended to replace

A. peas as the model organism of genetics.

B. fruit flies as the model organism of genetics.

C. natural selection as a cause of evolutionary change.

D. the idea of common descent in evolution.

E. the biometric approach to genetics.

Answer 21

c - de Vries wanted to undermine the idea that natural selection was a cause of evolutionary change

Question 22

William Whiston believed that the Earth

A. was created from nothing, by God, as set forth in the book of Genesis.

B. used to be a comet.

C. used to be a planet the size of Jupiter.

D. formed naturally from a nebula.

E. was formed from ejected material from the sun.

Answer 22

b - earth used to be a comet (this guy’s all about comets!)

Question 23

Which of these was not useful in the construction of the double helical model of DNA by Watson and Crick?

A. Chargaff’s rules

B. Levene’s results about relative base composition

C. X-ray crystallography

D. model building

E. Pauling’s protein helices

Answer 23

b - Levene’s relative base composition results were not useful for Watson + Crick’s DNA model

Question 24

What Is Life? was an influential book because it

A. proposed DNA as the hereditary material.

B. suggested that, under accepted chemical laws and principles, genes ought
not to be stable at biological temperatures.

C. focussed attention on the physical nature of genes.

D. demonstrated the ways in which Mendel’s hypothetical ‘hereditary
variants’ can interact in the cell.

E. demonstrated that genes are on chromosomes.

Answer 24

c - brought attention to the physical nature of genes

Question 25

James Hutton’s friend and popularizer was _____

Answer 25

John Playfair

Question 26

the Pacific islands where Darwin saw most clearly the evidences of evolutionary relationship

Answer 26

Galapagos Islands

Question 27

the model whereby geological changes take place at a fairly constant, slow rate over long periods of time

Answer 27

uniformitarianism

Question 28

models which propose evolutionary changes as large jumps

Answer 28

saltationist

(think about how active potentials jump over exposed nodes to myelin covered sheaths = that’s called saltation)

Question 29

Gregor Mendel’s day job

Answer 29

Monk or abbot

wanted to be a school teacher

Question 30

the primary interest (in terms of molecules) of the Cambridge lab where Watson and Crick worked

Answer 30

hemoglobin or myoglobin

Question 31

distinguish between: plutonism v neptunism

Answer 31

neptunism:
- Buffon
- receding oceans deposited sediments which build up geological formations
- slow and over time
- directionality

plutonism:
- Hutton + Lyell
- internal heat is the main driver of geological change
- continous, steady state, no directionality

Question 32

distinguish between: Mendel’s genetic work vs. de Vries genetic work

Answer 32

Mendel’s: worked only with peas

de Vries’: replicated his findings in many different plants

Question 33

distinguish between: Paracelsus on iatrochemistry vs. Sylvius on iatrochemistry

Answer 33

Paracelsus on iatrochemistry:
- astrologically based
- mystical and alchemical
- doctrine of signature
- single, simple drug therapy for disease
- a mystical, internal alchemist, the Archeus, controlled human chemistry
- chemistry should be central to medical studies

Sylvius on iatrochemistry:
- chemistry is at the heart of medicine, but no mystical alchemical elements of Paracelsus (no Archeus)
- made it a natural study

Question 34

distinguish between: Mendel’s approach to genetics vs. biometric school approach to genetics

Answer 34

Mendel: studied discrete characters (colours) and concluded there were separate, indivisible ‘atoms’ of inheritance

biometrics: studied continuous variation (ex. height, weight), no proposed discrete particles of inheritance