Natural Selection
Types of Natural Selection
Evidence for Evolution
Mechanisms of Evolution
Fossils
100
The English scientist Charles Darwin.
Who is considered the founder of the idea of Natural Selection?
100
Stabilizing, Directional and Disruptive.
What are the three types of natural selection?
100
The forelimbs of humans and whales are examples of this type of structure.
What is a homologous structure?
100
Name two types of isolation.
What is geographic and reproductive?
100
Earth is approximately this old.
What is 4.6 billion years old?
200
This "error" is necessary for natural selection and evolution to occur because it creates variation.
What is a mutation?
200
A species of rats live in a certain type of tree with the branches evenly spaced. Smaller rats could not reach from branch to branch and larger rats would break the branches and fall. Soon, all rats were just the right size for the tree branches. This is an example of which type of selection?
What is stabilizing selection?
200
The leaf frog blends so well into leaf litter that predators are unable to find it and its prey will come within close range because it doesn't realize its there exhibits this type of a structural adaptation.
What is camouflage?
200
All of alleles in a population's genes is known as this.
What is the gene pool?
200
This type of rock is most likely to contain fossils.
What is sedimentary rock?
300
Galapagos Island birds that exhibited a variety of beak shapes matched to the type of food they ate.
What are finches?
300
Deer mice that migrated to the sand hills of Nebraska changed from dark brown to light brown to better hide from predators in the sand exhibit this type of natural selection.
What is directional selection?
300
Ever since researchers sequenced the chimp genome in 2005, they have known that humans share about 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, making them our closest living relatives. This is an example of which type of evidence for evolution?
What is biochemistry?
300
The change of allelic frequencies in a population by chance events is called this.
What is genetic drift?
300
These parts, including the skeleton, bones, and shells or an organism, are the parts that are most often fossilized.
What are the hard parts?
400
Natural selection acts on this physical expression of an organism's genes.
What is phenotype?
400
Galapagos finches all have different types of beaks. During drought, the finches with the larger beaks survived better than those with smaller beaks. During rainy times, more small seeds were produced and the finches with smaller beaks fared better. Overall, the finches exhibit this type of selection.
What is disruptive selection?
400
Structures that do not have a common evolutionary origin but are similar in function are called...
What are analogous structures?
400
These two conditions of population size and the number of mutations would cause the most changes in a population.
What are a small population size and many mutations?
400
The "Law" of relative dating of fossils tells us that the oldest fossils lie on the bottom layers and the younger fossils are found in the top layers of rock.
What is the Law of Superposition?
500
These are Darwin's 4 Principles of Natural Selection.
What is overproduction of offspring, variation in offspring, organisms with useful variations survive and reproduce, and useful traits are inherited by offspring.
500
The tendency of human babies to weigh 7 pounds is an example of this type of suggestion. (For full credit, you have to explain how/why this evolved!)
What is stabilizing natural selection? Babies that are a lot smaller than 7 pounds may be too small to thrive and not survive and those that are much larger than 7 pounds may be too big to fit out the birth canal and cause problems during delivery.
500
In the presence of an antibiotic, this type of bacteria is able to survive and reproduce. For full credit, what is the nickname of this type of bacteria?
What is a mutated bacteria that has the trait of antibiotic resistance? It's nickname is a "superbug".
500
The process of breeding organisms with specific traits in order to produce offspring with those desired traits is an example of this. For full credit you must also identify an organism that has undergone this process.
What is artificial selection? Examples include: dogs, horses, cow (supercow!), and many crops.
500
This method of fossil dating utilizes radioactive isotopes and has tracked the oldest fossil found (a cyanobacteria) to be approximately 3.5 billion years old.
What is radiometric dating?