Intro and Evolutionary History
Which of the following are considered an organism's phenotype?
a) swimming speed
b) length of tail
c) DNA sequence
swimming speed, length of tail
What is the difference between selection and genetic drift?
A process in which environmental or genetic influences determine which types of organism thrive better than others, regarded as a factor in evolution.
Vs
A mechanism of evolution in which allele frequencies of a population change over generations due to chance (sampling error).
Heritability vs. Inherited – what's the difference?
Heritability refers to variation in a population, while inherited traits are those passed down genetically.
What is an umwelt?
The world as it is experienced by a particular organism.
hat part of the brain is known to grow in response to increased navigational training, such as in London taxi drivers?
hippocampus
What is the fallacy of the 'appeal to nature'?
Human behavior should not be used to justify or explain other animal behaviors.
What components are necessary for evolution by selection?
Variation, Inheritance, Selection, Time, and Adaptation
True or False: Height is inherited but not heritable.
False, it is both inherited and heritable.
How does bat hearing compare to human hearing?
Bats hear beyond the range of human hearing, from 9 kHz to 200 kHz.
What type of cognitive ability allows some animals to solve complex problems, like figuring out how to access food in novel situations?
problem-solving
What components are necessary for evolution by selection?
Variation, Inheritance, Selection, Time, and Adaptation
If cheetahs are influenced by environmental effects (like nutrition level) which have long term effects on behavior, is this selection and/or evolution?
Selection
Why can twins separated at birth exhibit the same and different behaviors?
Behaviors can arise from a change in gene regulation rather than a difference in gene sequences
Compare masking vs distracting pollutants.
Masking is where pollutant and sensory stimulus have similar properties, so sensory stimulus is washed out, whereas in distracting the pollutant is not similar to the sensory stimulus but instead limits attention to the stimulus.
Besides appearance, what traits are more similar in doppelgängers than in random individuals?
personality traits, educational levels, and certain behaviors like smoking habits
Young male songbirds first listen to the songs of nearby males of their species. Then they start to practice singing. By adulthood, male songbirds have learned how to produce the song that is characteristic of their species. Is this answerable by one or many of Tinbergen's questions?
Development (or ontogeny)
How do we measure fitness?
Survivorship and fecundity
What are the disadvantages of candidate gene studies?
Need good candidate gene (you may not have a good hypothesis about what to test) Not genome-wide
What are the cascading impacts of the ecology of fear?
Top and mid-level predators decrease, low prey increase foraging and habitat use.
How do some animals, like mountain chickadees, demonstrate the relationship between survival and cognitive ability?
Those with better cognitive abilities (such as spatial memory) are more likely to survive
Which tree is most parsimonious?
Leftmost
Is sexual selection a form of natural selection?
Sexual selection is not a subcategory of natural selection, as Darwin made very clear: it arises from differences in mating success, whereas natural selection is due to variance in all other fitness components. Sexual selection can occur without natural selection!
How does genetic variation change with genetic drift? Provide an example.
Decrease, ex. bottleneck
How do brood parasites learn their song?
They listen for a password from their mom, and then learn whatever song they hear after that password.
In the bee experiment, why do we see a peak shift in the discrimination group but not in the control group?
The discrimination group had an S- to stay away from whereas the control only had S+