Earth’s History and Radioactive Decay Note Guide
Name:
1. What are the planets and the sun formed from?
2. After how many years of collisions did the earth begin to take its final form? And what is the estimated age
of the earth?
3. What is the name of an atom with a specific number of protons but a different number of neutrons?
4. What is the mass number of an atom?
5. What is the difference between a radioactive isotope and radioactive decay?
6. Define half-life. What is the half-life of Carbon 14 (C14)?
7. What kind(s) of carbon are taken into the bodies of living things?
8. What happens to carbon 14 after the organism dies?
9. How can we determine when an organism died?
10. Carbon 14 dating is good in what and up to how long?
11. What is the example ratio of C14 to C12? How much of each does our example bone have?
12. We find a bone with C14:C12 ratio of 5g C14 to 155g C12. How much C14 was in the bone when the animal
died?
13. If the half-life of C14 is 5,730 years old, how old is the bone?
14. If the bone was left alone for another 5, 730 years, how many grams of C14 could be left in the bone?
15. How do you find the age of fossils that are older than 60,000 years old or don't have any more carbon in
them?
Approximately how
old are the trilobites
in the rock layers?
16. What is the half-life of Uranium238?
17 What is the half-life of Potassium40?
18. What is the half-life of Thorium230?
19. What is some of the evidence that these dating methods are accurate?
Fossil Note Guide
Name:
1. Define evolution.
2. What is a fossil?
3. Where are fossils found? What is it?
4. What is a mold?
5. What is a cast?
A
6. What are five things that a fossil can determine?
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
B
Which fossil above is a cast and which is a mold?
What kind of environment would you find these in?
7. Describe the law of superposition.
8. What are strata? What can you say about
fossils found in the same strata?
Which rock stratum is the oldest, which is the
youngest?
9. Define mass extinction.
10. Define biogeography.
11. Does everything become a fossil? If not, what conditions increase the chance of something becoming a
fossil?
12. Why might certain species or forms not have been fossilized?
13. What is the principle of fossil succession?
14. What is a transitional species?
15. Why have “Piltdown Man” and “Nebraska Man” been discredited as transitional species?
16. What are the age ranges of the transitional hominid skulls shown in the photo?
Darwin's Theories Note Guide
Name:
1. What is Lamarck’s theory of evolution?
2. Lamarck believed that acquired traits were passed on to offspring. What is an acquired trait?
3. Why can't you pass an acquired trait on to your offspring?
4. Even though Lamarck's ideas about acquired traits was incorrect, he did contribute to ideas about evolution
by being the first person to say that organisms did what?
5. Define natural selection.
6. What increases in a population over many generations?
7. What ship did Charles Darwin sail on? What was his role or job on the ship? How long was the ship’s
voyage?
Ship =________________________________
Job/Duties = ____________________________
Voyage length = _____________________________
8. Define uniformitarianism?
9. Darwin collected 13 species of finches during his trip to the Galapagos islands. They all had some similar
features yet each had a different mode of feeding. What did Darwin hypothesize based on his observations of
these finches?
10. Describe Darwin’s theory of descent with modification.
11. Darwin had a book by Thomas Malthus that talked about population growth. What did Malthus notice about
populations?
12. What did Darwin notice about populations?
13. Define fitness.
14. What does survival of the fittest mean?
15. What selects traits? (What determines what the good traits are?)
16. What happens to organisms when they cannot adapt to their quickly changing environment?
17. REMEMBER:
A. Organisms do not purposely _________________________________________________
B. Conditions in the ________________________ selects the best traits
C. A favorable trait that an organism happens to have is called an ____________________________
18. When a new populations comes into a new area what is there competition for?
19. Darwin's finches had variation in their ___________________. Birds with bigger ___________ could eat
bigger seeds. This helped them survive because they now had more ________________ than the other birds.
20. How can two groups of the same
species be reproductively isolated?
21. What does speciation mean?
22. Define niche.
What are some of the niches of the finches
Darwin found?
23. Can two species have the same niche and still live in the same location for very long? Why or why not?
Evidence and Patterns of Evolution Note Guide
Name:
1. What is a homologous structure?
2. How are homologous structures derived?
3. Define analogous structures.
4. How are analogous structures derived?
5. A. What part of a human and a bat are
homologous?
Human arm
B. Are those 2 parts also analogous?
Explain
Bat
6. What is a vestigial organ? Give some examples.
7. Where may vestigial organs come from? (Why do we still
have these “useless” organs or structures like an appendix?)
8. How do all vertebrate embryos compare to one another? What does this suggest?
9. What is a homologous protein?
10. If the proteins in different species only differ by a few amino acids, what does this suggest?
11. Define co-evolution and give an example.
12. Define convergent evolution and give and example.
13. Define divergent evolution
14. Identify each of the following pictures as examples of convergent evolution, coevolution or divergent
evolution:
Evolution of Populations: Note Guide
Name:
1. Define population.
2. Does evolution occur in individuals or populations?
There must be _________________________ for evolution to occur.
3. If we look at variation in a population (like height or grades) it usually forms a ______________ curve with the
majority of organisms in ____________________.
Draw what the curve looks like below:
#
people
short
tall
Height
4. How can genetic mutations cause variation?
5. How can an organism’s environment cause variation?
6. What is a gene pool?
7. Define and give examples of…
Allele frequency- (remember: alleles are variations of a particular gene like blue eyes is a variation of
eye color)
Phenotypic frequency- (remember phenotype is the observable trait like blue or brown eyes)
Genotypic frequency – (remember genotype is the “letter” combination of alleles like BB, Bb or bb)
8. If a population is in Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium is it evolving?
9. What causes the gene pool of a population to happen?
A. Mu________________
B. Migration = _______________________________________________________________
Immigration = _________________________________________________________
Emigration = _________________________________________________________
C. Genetic _________________= change in alleles due to ___________________
Explain how the picture is an example of this:
9. Changes to the gene pool cont.
If these men were the only males in your gene
pool, would there probably be non-random mating?
D. Assortative or non-random mating – which means ______________________________________
10. What is stabilizing selection?
11. Define disruptive selection.
12. Define directional selection.
13. Label each of the selection curves below as an example of stabilizing, disruptive or directional selection:
14. What is sexual selection? Give an example.
15. What is the morphological concept in species definition? What is the problem with this method?
16. What is the biological concept of species definition? What problems does this method cause?
17. Isolating Mechanisms that can lead to speciation (formation of new species)
A. Geographical isolation =
B. Reproductive isolation =
1. prezygotic isolation occurs ____________ fertilization (like different ______________
________________ for frogs)
2. postzygotic isolation occurs _____________ fertilization and produces _______________ or
_________________ offspring like a mule
18. There are 2 theories about the rate of evolution (how fast new species are formed). Briefly describe each.
A. Gradualism B. Punctuated Equilibrium
The current theory
seems to indicate a
__________ of the two.