Term
| When did James Usher suggest that life on Earth started and how did he arrive at this particular date? |
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Definition
| October, 23 4004 B.C. Ussher used astronomical cycles and Old Testament genealogies. |
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Term
| What are the two components of the theory of Special Creation? |
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Definition
1. Claims about the pattern of life’s history
1) Spp don’t change
2) spp were created independently of one another
3) Spp were created recently
2. Identification of the process responsible for producing the pattern: independent acts of creation by a designer
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Term
How do/did observations from the soapberry bug in Florida show evidence for “change through time”? |
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Definition
Soapberry bug populations that were introduced to a smaller pod food source eventually had a smaller average beak size than those who ate round pods. |
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Term
How did Sean Carrol and colleagues show that the variation in soapberry bug beak length was heritable and why was this important? |
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Definition
They showed that it was heritable by raising short beaked bugs on round pods and long beaked bugs on small pods. Offspring of each had the same length beak, thus eliminating the possibility of environmental factors. |
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Term
| What is a vestigial organ? Give an example of one. |
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Definition
A vestigial organ is a useless version of a body part that has some use in a related organism. (eg. Human coccyx) |
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Term
| Give an example of a vestigial molecular trait. |
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Definition
| Humans have a vestigial gene on chr 6. It codes for CMAH enzyme in primates, but is nonfunctional in humans because of a 92-base-pair deletion. |
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Term
| How did Cresko and colleagues discover that the body armour of marine and freshwater sticklebacks was heritable? |
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Definition
Crossing a heavily armored stickleback with a lightly armored stickleback yielded a 9:3:3:1 ratio (dihybrid cross indicating 2 alleles responsible) |
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Term
| Describe Michael Bell and colleagues’ research involving sticklebacks in Lowberg Lake in Alaska involving sticklebacks. |
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Definition
| Fully plated fish invaded a lake. 12 years later, the ratio changed from 95% fully plated to 75% lightly plated. |
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Term
| What three facts from the fossil record bolstered Darwin’s argument for evolution? |
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Definition
Extinction, the Law of Succession (correspondence between fossil and living forms in the same locale), transitional species |
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Term
| What is the difference between a phylogeny and an evolutionary tree? |
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Definition
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Term
| Describe why phylogenies are considered to be hypotheses? |
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Definition
Phylogenies are hypothesis because they are the best guess at discovering relatedness. No one knows the true evolutionary history of a lineage older than a few thousand years. |
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Term
| Describe the concept of a ring species and explain how it can be used as evidence for common ancestry. |
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Definition
A species whose geographic range is in the shape of a large ring. By the time the range reconnects, the birds from either end of the ring have modified so much that they are unwilling to mate. This makes two separate species. (eg. Greenish Warblers show that with space and time, one species can gradually divide into two.)
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Term
Describe what homologies are and list the three different types. Give an example of each.
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Definition
“the study of likeness”. “The same organ in different animals under every variety of form and function.” Similarity due to the inheritance of traits from a common ancestor.
1) Structural Homology – (arm bones of humans, moles, horses, dolphins, bats)
2) Developmental Homology – (embryos of snakes, chickens, possums, cats, bats, humans)
3) Molecular Homology – genetic code, processed pseudogenes |
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Term
| What is a processed pseudogene? |
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Definition
| A nonfunctional copy of a normal gene that originates when processed mRNAs are accidentally reverse transcribed to DNA, then inserted back into the genome at a new location. They lack both introns and promoters. |
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Term
| What is a retrotransposon? |
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Definition
A retrovirus-like genetic element that jumps from place to place in the genome via transcription to RNA, reverse transcription to DNA, and insertion at a new site.
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Term
How did Friedberg and Rhoads use processed pseudogenes to build a phylogeny of primates?
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Definition
The older a processed pseudogene, the more mutations it will accumulate. Friedberg and Rhoads estimated the ages of 6 processed pseudogenes in the human genome. Then they looked for the same processed pseudogenes in primates to see which were shared. They found that humans share the youngest PP with Chimps/Gorillas.
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Term
| Explain the principle of Uniformitarianism and who first articulated this principle? |
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Definition
| Uniformitarianism – (James Hutton 1700s) geological processes taking place now operated similarly in the past |
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Term
| Explain how the principle of radiometric dating works |
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Definition
Many rocks have unstable isotopes that decay at a fixed rate. Moon rocks and meteorites have been tested and found to be around 4.6 billion years old.
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Term
| What are the oldest fossils of life on earth and how old are they? |
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Definition
Cyanobacteria and eukaryotic algae fossils are 2 billion years old. Reports of 3.4-3.5 bya fossils. Biological molecules: 2.7 billion years old. Chemical evidence suggests life is 3.7 billion years old.
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Term
| How long has life been evolving on Earth? |
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Definition
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Term
Describe what Kenneth Miller sees as lacking in the Scientific Method as a way of knowing?
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Definition
| Science cannot assign meaning or purpose, and that indicates that a transcendent being must be responsible for assigning meaning and value |
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Term
| Are science and religion mutually exclusive? Why or why not? |
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Definition
No, many religions have found ways to reconcile scientific principles with their beliefs (or they do not conflict at all). There are things in the world that science cannot be explained by science alone. |
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