Evolution, Origin of Life & Classification
1. What was Darwin’s greatest contribution to science, and how did he develop it? Explain how Darwin’s observation of the tortoises on the Galápagos Islands influenced his thinking.
2. Suppose that selective breeding has produced a population of very similar chickens. Would that population survive if it were released into the world? Explain.
3. How is the idea of common descent supported by examples of homologous structures?
4. Explain how shuffling a deck of playing cards can be a good model for the effect of sexual reproduction’s effect on the relative frequency of alleles in a population and the possible combinations of alleles.
5. Describe the founder effect, and describe the conditions in which it arises.
6. The Hardy-Weinberg principle gives the conditions needed for the frequency of alleles in a population to remain unchanged. Describe those conditions.
7. Describe Stanley Miller and Harold Urey’s famous experiment. Describe their results as well as the results of similar experiments based on more current knowledge.
8. Define and explain the endosymbiotic theory.
9. How is binomial nomenclature superior to the descriptive names used by early scientists?
10. How does traditional classification differ from evolutionary classification? How are neutral mutations useful for estimating how long two species have been evolving independently?
