Biol 467 Evolution Study Guide 1
p1
This is intended to be an exercise, i.e., practice for exam 1. It is NOT a complete list of material for which you are
responsible. Exams will concentrate on lecture material, but you are responsible for any concepts in the assigned
readings from the text book. In general, your text goes into more detail with examples than you will be examined on.
Understand the principles, be able to define all italicized or boldfaced terms, and be able to cite some examples (i.e., of
history, phenomena, or concepts) accurately without concerning yourself on memorizing every detail of every example
provided in the text.
Read each question carefully and, minimally, answer exactly what it asks. A complete answer will include an
explanation, e.g., definition of term, explanation of how or why, for all technical terms and concepts either posed in the
question or used in the answer. Your response should be balanced to address all aspects of the question, rather than
going into great detail about . Space for answering open-ended questions is limited on exams, so be concise but make
good use of all the space you have available to you.
1) Define biological evolution. What two things are requisite for it to occur.
2) Distinguish between evolution as hypothesis, fact, and theory.
3) Give a specific example of something in biology that does not make sense without knowledge of the
evolution of how it came to be.
4) Darwin's thoughts on evolution were influenced positively by several of his predecessors and
contemporaries. Give an example of whom, their thoughts, and how Darwin modified their thoughts.
5) Cite a specific observation made by Darwin that influenced his thoughts on evolution.
6) What was Darwin's single biggest contribution to thoughts on evolution?
7) What is meant by the "New Synthesis"? What is synthetic about it and why did it represent such an
important change in thinking about evolution?
8) What tenets of the New Synthesis are, in fact, ideas introduced by Darwin?
9) What valid contributions did Lamarck make to thoughts on evolution?
10) Define the biogenic principle ("law"). Provide a biological explanation for it as well as an example of
it.
11) Why is RNA thought to probably have been the first autocatalytic and hereditary material?
12) Describe Miller's (1953) experiment, its result, and its significance.
13) Name and describe changes in earth and biological history throughout the Phanerozoic.
14) Provide an overview of plate tectonic theory, including an account of the large geophysical structures
that characterize the surface of this planet.
15) Give a specific example of the evolution of a lineage as it is inferred from the fossil record. Cite the
names of hypothesized ancestors and descendents, or primitive and derived species, and their position in
the geological timescale as best you can. Briefly describe salient aspects of the evolution of their
morphology.
16) Describe MacArthur and Wilson's theory of island biogeography verbally and graphically.
17) Contrast the two competing hypotheses that account for disjunct endemism. Provide examples of the
types of events (not taxa) that comprise each.
18) Discriminate between phylogeny as a fact and phylogenetic inference as a hypothesis.
19) Explain how a particular trait can be both a synapomorphy and a symplesiomorphy at the same time.
20) Distinguish a priori from a posteriori assessments of homology. How are they dependent or
independent? What does the latter teach us about homoplasy?
21) Exactly what does it mean to say that a node or branch on a cladogram has a bootstrap value of 95%?
How often would this tree be obtained from these data but be incorrect?
22) Verbally describe the relationship of synapomorphy to monophyly, symplesiomorphy and
autapomorphy to paraphyly, and homoplasy to polyphyly using specific examples of characters and taxa.
Draw small cladograms to illustrate your examples.
23) Contrast different methods of inferring "confidence" in phylogenetic reconstructions, both in the broad
and statistical senses.
Biol 467 Evolution Study Guide 1
p2
24) Perform parsimony analysis on the data set below. Calculate consistency index for each character.
What is the decay index for the anteater-bluebird clade? Draw a majority rule consensus tree for all
three networks, rooted to dandilion. Show all work.
anteater:
bluebird:
catepillar:
dandilion:
12345
aatgt
aatgt
agcgt
aacgt
67890
agcga
ggcgg
gatgg
aatac
25) Construct a distance matrix from the character matrix below. Explain any conclusions you can draw
about clock-like evolution from the application of Sarich and Wilson's (1967) relative rate test.
12345 67890
cat: aatgt aacgg
dog: agtgt aatgg
fish: aacgt gttaa
Define each of the following as specifically as possible in one or two sentences at most. An example is not
a definition, and a term should not be used in the definition of itself. Identify for what each of the
historiocal figures is famous.
adaptive radiation
allele
autocatalysis
biological species
carbonaceous chondrite
character state
chronospecies
cladogenesis
grade
homology
homoplasy
Hyracotherium
Latimeria
meiosis
mesosaur
microevolution
mosaic evolution
ontogeny
orthogenesis
paralogy
paraphyly
parallelism
phenetic
phylogeny
phylogram
plate tectonics
prebiotic
pseudoextinction
puntuated equilibrium
recombination
superposition
synapomorphy
synapsis
Systema Naturae
systematics
uniformitarianism
deVries
Dobzansky
Malthus
Mendel
Lamarck
LeClerc
Linnaeus
Wallace