Exam 3 Flashcards
(209 cards)
When did earth form?
4.6 billion years ago (bya)
When did life first form/evolve?
- Shortly after
- About 3.8 billion years ago
When did life emerge from water?
?½ million years ago?
billion probably?
When did human emerge?
About 2 million years ago (just a handful of years ago)
Common Descent with Modification
- A principle of the theory of evolution
- Species undergo modification through successive generations
- Changes in species can lead to formation of new, separate species
Species
In its simplest sense, they are different kinds of organisms
- Individual of the same species share genetic similarity and can (potentially) interbreed
- there is no good species concept
Population
-All individuals of the same species occupying a specific area over a particular time
All species have…
- Descended from other species
- A common ancestor lies at the base of evolutionary tree
What is the meaning of life?
Fitness (a measure of the number of successful offspring you leave in the next generation)
-Successful reproduction (leaving behind copies of yourself, or more specifically your genes)
Natural Selection
- Darwin
- An agent of evolution (“agent” means “something that causes”)
- Another basic principle in the theory of evolution
- Process through which a trait (or character) that confers reproductive advantage to an individual spreads in a population over successive generations
Biotic Potential
- Most populations are capable of producing more offspring that can be supported by the environment
- Exponential growth
Process of Natural Selection
-More offspring reproduced than can be supported by the environment
- Within populations, there is variation of traits between individuals:
- some of this variation is heritable
- variation in physical, psychological (or physiological), or behavioral traits with a genetic basis that can be passed onto offspring
- Because of their particular traits, some individuals have higher fitness (leave behind more offspring) than other individuals lacking the traits
- Overtime, beneficial traits passed through the population
Natural selection requires what?
- Competition!
- During competition for resources, some individuals will have an advantage because of physical, physiological, or behavioral traits
- Genetic traits that provided an advantage will be spread within a population, but those that do not will be lost from the population
- Selection through this process will change a population’s phenotype over time
- Individuals do not evolve, populations do!
Evolution
-Any genetically-based change of phenotype in a population over successive generations
What is it that evolves?
-Populations!
Example of allele changes in frog populations
- In original environment, it’s one large population, so they could interbreed
- In environment where species are separated, then they eventually can’t interbreed anymore
- In the different areas, fitness was increased for individuals with coloration that better matched each environment.
Importance of evolutionary thinking?
- Species are not fixed entities, but instead are constantly undergoing modification and change
- Organism today descended from other varieties that existed before them
- Humans have descended from other organisms that existed before them
Author and information of author of natural selection book?
- Charles Darwin
- Book is on the origin of species by means of natural selection (1859)
- Developed existing ideas about descent with modification
- Acquired a large body of supporting evidence
- Perceived natural selection as the primary force driving descent with modification
Other guy who isn’t Darwin and info on him?
- Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1809, before Darwin)
- Evolution of acquired characters
- Believed over time, an organism could acquire enough changes that one species could diverge into two, but also believed organisms change form over generations through inheritance of acquired characteristics (which is very wrong; examples of gauges, giraffes, etc.)
- REMEMBER: ON TEST, HE WILL HAVE QUESTION LIKE THE ONE ON GIRAFFES, AND THE ANSWER WILL (MOST LIKELY) BE DARWIN’S THEORY
Five Agents of Evolution?
- Natural Selection
- Sexual Selection
- Gene Flow
- Genetic Drift
- Mutation
Where do traits come from?
Mutations!
Mutation (in terms of traits and evolution)
- It’s a change in DNA sequence
- The only means by which new genetic information is generated
- Most are detrimental or harmless, but rare few are beneficial to organisms’ fitness
- Beneficial mutations are the building blocks of evolutionary change
What is the importance of the opsin gene mutation in primates?
- Mutation that duplicated an opsin gene
- Eventually mutated enough to see more color
Gene Flow
- The movement of alleles from one population to another by migration
- Introduce “novel” alleles to a population from some other population