Vocabulary Essentials
What is a population?
This type of trait makes it easier for an organism to survive in its specific environment.
What is an adaptive trait?
This type of graph is used to show the distribution of traits in a population.
What is a histogram?
This specific population of animals were the central mystery of the unit.
What are rough-skinned newts?
These blue/green/yellow, bird-like organisms were often studied in the Sim for their fur and color traits.
What are ostrilopes?
Whether a trait is adaptive or non-adaptive depends entirely on this.
What is the environment?
What are individuals?
Some of the newts in the mystery population are poisonous to kill this.
What is a human/garter snake?
These are the yellow, plant-like organisms in the Sim that show variation in water storage.
What are thornpalms?
A characteristic that all members of a species have, which varies between individuals (e.g. wing color).
What is a feature?
Over many generations, individuals with these traits become more common in a population.
What are adaptive traits?
This term describes the variety of different traits present a population.
What is variation?
What is "because they wanted to"?
This type of organism in the Sim acts as a predator.
What are carnithons?
What is a mutation?
This term describes a trait that makes it harder for an organism to survive in its environment.
What is a non-adaptive trait?
If a histogram shows most individuals moved from "low fur" to "high fur," this has changed over time.
What is trait distribution?
This is the predator that caused high poison levels to become an adaptive trait for newts.
To see how traits change over time in the Sim, you must switch from 'Build" mode to this mode.
What is Run mode?
These are instructions for making protein molecules and are found on chromosomes.
What are genes?
Biologists analyze these (the causes) to explain changes in the distribution of traits (the effects).
What are environmental conditions?
The number of individuals with each trait in a population can change over this period of time.
What is many generations?
This process is how a poison-level trait that wasn't always present first appeared in the population.
What is a mutation?
In the classroom model of reproduction, these objects were used to represent different color traits.
What are colored cubes?