Mechanisms of Evolution
This mechanism involves differential reproductive success, resulting in adaptation.
What is Natural Selection?
Species are groups of actually or potentially
interbreeding natural populations that are reproductively isolated from other such groups.
What is the Biological Species Concept?
This phrase, often associated with natural selection, describes how individuals with favorable traits leave more offspring.
What is "Survival of the Fittest?
These are preserved remains or traces of ancient organisms that show how life has changed over geological time.
What are fossils?
Is the contribution an individual makes to the
gene pool of the next generation relative to the
contributions of other individuals.
What is Darwinian Fitness?
This mechanism is the original source of all new genetic variation.
What is Mutations?
This concept classifies species based on observable traits, like size, shape, and structure.
What is the Morphological Species Concept?
This is the term for traits that increase an organism’s chances of surviving and reproducing in its environment.
What is Adaptations?
The study of how species are distributed across different continents and islands provides evidence for evolution.
What is biogeography?
Results from a drastic reduction in population
size.
What is The Bottleneck Effect?
This mechanism describes when a(n) organism(s) moves between populations, introducing or removing alleles.
What is Gene Flow?
This concept uses shared evolutionary history and common ancestry, often shown in trees, to define species.
What is the Phylogenetic Species Concept?
Darwin noticed that individuals in a population vary, and that these differences must be heritable for natural selection to occur. This requirement is known as what?
What is variation and heritability of traits?
Similarity in a feature due to inheritance from a common ancestor with subsequent modification.
What is Comparative Anatomy and Homology?
This type of genetic drift occurs when a small group of individuals starts a new population, carrying only a fraction of the original population’s genetic diversity.
What is the Founder Effect?
This mechanism occurs when chance events randomly change allele frequencies, especially in small populations.
What is Genetic Drift?
A major weakness of this species concept is that it doesn’t work for fossils or organisms that reproduce asexually.
In natural selection, this occurs when intermediate traits are favored, reducing extremes in a population.
What is Stabilizing Selection?
Embryos of related species bear more common features in early stages than in later, more specialized stages.
What is Comparative Embryology?
The two modes of speciation.
Describes how some individuals have more opportunity to mate than others, and thus produce more offspring (and more copies of their genes) than others.
What is non-random mating?
A major strength of this species concept is that it can be applied to both sexual and asexual species, but it may lead to identifying many more species than other concepts.
What is the Phylogenetic Species Concept?
This mode of natural selection favors both extremes of a trait, leading to greater variation or even new species.
What is Disruptive Selection?
Using DNA, RNA, and protein sequences across species to investigate evolutionary relationships at the molecular level.
What is Molecular Biology?