lesson 1
what is a fossil?
the preserved remains or traces of an organism that lived in the past.
what is a mechanism?
The natural process of which something takes place.
This term refers to the total collection of all alleles and genes in a breeding population.
What is a gene pool?
The total collection of all fossils discovered on Earth provides a historical timeline of life.
What is fossil record?
large organic molecule made of carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen, oxygen, and sometimes sulfur
What is a protein?
how are variations and adaptions similar?
Both are inherited traits within a population that are rooted in genetic differences.
Nature filters out the weak, so only the winners survive to have babies with the same winning traits.
How does natural selection help a species to evolve?
This is defined as an organism's ability to survive and successfully reproduce in a specific environment.
What is fitness?
Dinosaur footprints, burrows, and fossilized feces are examples of this type of fossil, which provides evidence of behavior rather than body parts.
What is a trace fossil?
These physical structures once had an important function in an ancestor, but are now reduced in size and have no major purpose, like the human appendix or whale hip bones.
What are vestigial structures?
how are variations and adaptions different?
Variation refers to the natural differences in traits among individuals within a single species.[
Darwin bred this specific bird to study artificial selection and variation.
What is a pigeon?
A process characterized by the random change in allele frequencies from generation to generation, which has a disproportionately larger effect in small populations.
What is genetic drift?
Although the fossil record provides undeniable evidence of past life, scientists note that it is incomplete because this process destroys the bodies of most organisms before they can be buried in sediment.
What is decomposition?
These structures look similar and share the same function, but evolved independently in unrelated species.
What are analogous structures?
why are fossils important to the development of the theory of evolution?
they provide direct, physical evidence of past life forms and illustrate the progression of evolutionary change over millions of years.
Before his voyage on the HMS Beagle, Darwin was heavily influenced by the writings of this geologist and the principles of uniformitarianism.
Who is Charles Lyell?
Also known as migration, this mechanism occurs when individuals leave or join a population, introducing or removing alleles.
What is gene flow?
When scientists organize all fossilized life-forms chronologically on a branching, treelike diagram to show evolutionary relationships, they are creating this.
What is an evolutionary tree?
Analogous structures are the result of this type of evolutionary pattern, where unrelated species adapt to similar environments in similar ways.
What is convergent evolution?
name four people who contributed to the study of evolution
Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Gregor Mendel.
This modern type of evidence for evolution analyzes the genetic blueprint shared by related organisms.
What is DNA comparison?
Instead of nature, humans drive the selective breeding of plants and animals to achieve desired traits in this process.
What is artificial selection?
This sticky tree resin traps insects and preserves them with remarkably little decay, sometimes even trapping ancient DNA.
What is amber?
Unlike convergent evolution, this type of evolution occurs when related species become more and more different as they adapt to different environments.
What is divergent evolution?