Basics
This term describes a group of individuals of the same species living in one area.
What is a population?
This form of selection occurs when humans choose which organisms breed together.
What is artificial selection?
This process occurs when a population changes enough to become a different species from another population.
What is speciation?
These fossils contain characteristics of both an ancestral species and its descendants.
What are transitional fossils?
This field of evolutionary evidence involves the study of how continents have drifted apart over time.
What is biogeography?
This term describes differences between individuals in a population caused by different alleles.
What is variation?
In natural selection, this environmental factor influences which organisms are more likely to survive and reproduce.
This movement of alleles throughout a population occurs when individuals can breed with one another.
What is gene flow?
This method determines whether one fossil is older or younger than another by comparing its position in rock layers.
What is relative dating/stratigraphy?
This process explains how one ancient supercontinent separated into smaller continents that drifted apart.
What is continental drift?
This is the name for all of the alleles found in a population.
What is the gene pool?
This step of natural selection occurs when individuals with advantageous alleles are more likely to survive and produce offspring.
For speciation to occur, two populations usually need to experience this, preventing them from breeding with each other.
What is isolation/a barrier?
These structures share the same evolutionary origin but may now perform different functions.
What are homologous structures?
The separation of continents caused this step of speciation in populations.
What is geographical (or physical) isolation/separation?
These random changes in DNA create new alleles and may be beneficial, detrimental or have no effect.
What are mutations?
A population contains individuals with different alleles, but not all individuals survive because of a selective agent. These describe the first two steps of this process.
What is natural selection?
This process describes two species becoming increasingly different from one another over time.
What is divergence?
These structures have different evolutionary origins but similar functions, often because unrelated species experience similar selection pressures.
What are analogous structures?
Species with very similar DNA sequences are likely to share this.
What is a recent common ancestor?
This process is defined as any change in a population over an extended period of time.
What is evolution?
The phenomenon where an antibiotic kills most bacteria, but bacteria carrying a resistance allele survive and reproduce.
What is antibiotic resistance?
The result of two different species interbreeding.
What are infertile offspring?
The human arm and bat wing have a similar underlying structure inherited from a common ancestor, despite performing different functions. They provide evidence for this type of evolutionary change.
What is divergent evolution?
Scientists compare DNA sequences and display evolutionary relationships using this branching diagram, placing closely related species nearer together.
What is a phylogenetic tree?