Natural Selection
This phrase, often associated with natural selection, describes how organisms best suited to their environment are the ones that reproduce.
What is "survival of the fittest"?
These preserved remains or traces of ancient organisms provide a chronological record of how species changed over time.
What are fossils?
Darwin formulated his groundbreaking ideas on evolution while serving as a naturalist aboard this British naval ship.
What is the HMS Beagle?
This event occurs when the very last individual of a species dies out completely.
What is extinction?
During the Industrial Revolution, these insects in England rapidly shifted from light to dark coloration to blend in with soot-covered trees.
What are peppered moths?
Environmental factors like predators, climate, and disease that drive natural selection are known by this two-word term.
What are selective pressures?
Body parts in different species that share a similar underlying bone structure because they were inherited from a common ancestor.
What are homologous structures?
Published in 1859, this is the title of Charles Darwin's seminal book detailing his theory of evolution.
What is On the Origin of Species?
This type of isolation occurs when a physical barrier, like a mountain range or river, splits a population into two.
What is Geographic Isolation?
This modern medical crisis is driven by natural selection, as overuse of drugs allows "superbugs" to survive and multiply.
What is Antibiotic Resistance?
An inherited characteristic that increases an organism's chance of surviving and reproducing in its specific environment.
What is Adaptation?
Scientists look at the similarities in this molecule, the universal genetic code, to determine how closely related two species are.
What is DNA?
Darwin's famous observations of finches and tortoises primarily took place on this Pacific archipelago.
What are the Galápagos Islands?
The formation of a new and distinct species through the course of evolution.
What is Speciation?
The distinct beak shapes of the Galápagos finches are adapted to exploit different types of this resource.
What is Food?
Unlike artificial selection (like dog breeding), natural selection relies on this random process to create new genetic traits.
What is mutation?
The study of organisms in their earliest stages of development, which reveals striking similarities between fish, birds, and humans.
What is Embroyology?
This French naturalist proposed an earlier, incorrect theory of evolution stating that organisms pass on traits acquired during their lifetime.
Who was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck?
This catastrophic event 66 million years ago wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and marked the end of the Cretaceous period.
What is a Mass Extinction?
This viral disease changes rapidly every year due to natural selection, requiring humans to formulate a new vaccine annually.
What is Influenza?
This type of selection occurs when environmental changes favor individuals at both extremes of a phenotypic range over intermediate phenotypes.
What is disruptive (or diversifying) selection?
Remnants of structures that had a function in an early ancestor but are useless in the modern organism, like the human appendix or whale pelvic bones.
What are Vestigial Structures?
Darwin rushed to publish his work after receiving a manuscript from this fellow British naturalist who had independently conceived the same theory.
Who was Alfred Russel Wallace?
When two populations can no longer interbreed to produce fertile offspring, they have achieved this type of isolation, finalizing speciation.
What is Reproductive Isolation?
This terms describes the rapid evolution of diversely adapted species from a common ancestor when new ecological niches open up, as seen in Darwin's finches.
What is adaptive radiation?