ZOO 206 Study questions for Chapters 2 3 and 4 Evolutionary Analysis 4th ed 1 How do Creation Science Intelligent Design theories and the Leprechaun Theory differ from Evolutionary Theory Why did Judge William Overton decide that Act 590 what did Act 590 mandate was unconstitutional What did John Jones decide about the Intelligent Design curriculum in Dover PA All creationist theories are based in religion not in scientific fact They argue that their point is 100 correct when evolutionary theory is always tentative ready to be disproven in light to adequate scientific evidence Overton ruled that the mandate that creation science be taught alongside evolutionary theory was unconstitutional because it violated the establishment clause of the 1 st Amendment Jones ruled that the ID curriculum was also unconstitutional because it was just a re naming of creationism 2 Describe in detail the types of evidence for evolution by natural selection e g change over time vestigial organs homologies etc and describe how these examples are evidence for descent with modification Geologic evidence from radioactive dating supports the 4 6 billion year old proposed age of the earth Humans Artificially select to domesticate organisms Fossil evidence shows the existence of transitional species as well as species that no longer exist Genotypes and phenotypes change over time as supported by soapberry bugs changing beak size and finches beak size changing in response to droughts Vestigial structures are non functional remnants of structures that were functional in ancestral species Homology in seemingly unrelated species such as the forelimbs of animals Structures look similar in stages of development indicating common ancestry All organisms contain a DNA genome All organisms use the same pathway for gene expression All organisms share the same codons for the same amino acids Organisms contain retrotransposons that are mutated viruses that are part of the genome Organisms with common ancestry share the same processed pseudogenes and can be dated by estimating the rate of mutation over periods of time 3 What are the basic conditions required for natural selection to affect the frequency of some trait What did Darwin and predecessors conclude about the reproductive potential of species The trait must be heritable The trait must have an effect of the organism s fitness The trait must be increasing in frequency or being maintained in the population Reproductive success must vary between individuals 4 Describe the characteristics that are incorrectly attributed to the process of natural selection Why are they incorrect 5 Describe the factors that appear to have influenced the evolution of beak depth shape and overall body size of medium ground finches on the island of Daphne Major since the severe drought in the late 70s and the one in 03 04 Also what was the effect of the newly established larger finch in the later years of the Grant s study What are the possible explanations besides genetic similarity for why beak depth of offspring is similar to that of parents Overall the shape of the beaks got shorter after the droughts Larger finches died off and most of the finches grew smaller in general 6 What do the phenotypic changes the medium ground finches underwent over the course of decades and the photos in The Big Red Book indicate about the direction of evolutionary change Evolution is not forward looking it has no direction 7 Describe the experiment by Jones and Reithel to test if natural selection affected alleles for flower color in snapdragons What experiment did they do and how did they interpret the results 8 Describe how synapomorphies are used to create phylogenies e g cladograms 9 Define convergent evolution and the role of parsimony in determining that camera eyes in vertebrates and cephalopods are apparently an example of convergent evolution What s a reversal and what can it lead us to infer 10 Describe the evidence that whales and their relatives are most closely related to hippos than to other artiodactyls 11 Describe how SINES and LINES can be used to resolve character conflicts in different phylogenies for the same taxa 12 What is bootstrapping and how is it used to determine the probability that a particular phylogeny is the correct one