BSC 2011 UNIT III STUDY GUIDE PART A UNIT III Evolution and Population Genetics 1 Discuss the following various views people held about life s diversity how it arose and the age of the earth old young before evolution was suggested a Essentialism idealism Plato God created all things All things have a constant perfect essence ideal form Variation is an imperfect reflection of the inner essence No potential life was left unrealized Species don t change no new species Aristotle and the Scala of Nature Scale of Nature All living things are fixed in a linear hierarchy Nothing was left out of the hierarchy a k a species can t won t and shouldn t change b Natural theology Natural Theologians monotheistic Western Christians educated around 1600s 1700s Studied the natural world to better understand God s Plan All species were divinely created perfectly all at the same time Around 6000 years ago based on Judeo Christian book of Genesis from the Old Testament Islam and Hindu religions also have similar creation story Side Note As early as 4th century Saint Augustine wrote God probably only created simple life forms and these developed over time Carolus Linnaeus 1750 Organized life into a nested classification system based on similar appearance Each type of organism had a 2 part binomial scientific name Genus Species Either Italicized or Underlined Charles Darwin 1809 1882 Attended Cambridge to become a minister and a naturalist 1831 unpaid naturalist on 5 year voyage on the HMS Beagle cestry 1 He observed that organisms on same continent more similar than ones on different con tinents 2 He saw a correlation between location and similarity and this suggested common an Extended Malthus ideas to plants and animals Populations in nature are capable of far greater growth than natural resources can sup port Idea of a conflict between limited natural resources and reproduction was the seed of Darwin s idea of evolution by natural selection NS was Darwin s proposed mechanism to explain how why species can change over time i e evolve Thomas Malthus 1766 1834 Demographer and political economist He said the fate is the poor is inescapable because their reproduction exceeds their means of sustenance e g higher infant mortality and childhood mortality This was the first suggestion of resource limitation competition leading to survival of the fittest Alfred Wallace 1858 Sends Darwin an example of his manuscript outlining his similar view of evolution by nat ural selection which forces his hand in publishing his manuscript On the Origin of Species One of the early Paleontologists also a natural theologian Accepted divine creation Believed in a relatively young age for Earth Sporadic catastrophes caused the appearance and disappearance of organisms the fos E g Local floods wiped out existing species and neighboring species moved in c Catastrophism Georges Cuvier 1769 1832 sil record No Evolution d Uniformitarianism James Hutton 1726 1797 Geological gradualism Geological features were formed slowly and gradually over a long period of time not by catastrophes e g erosion and sedimentation Charles Lyell 1797 18 Mechanisms of geological change are constant over time uniform The same processes that happen today happened in the past at the same rate Therefore The earth must be very old to accumulate all of the geological changes that have occurred Jean Baptiste Lamarck 1744 1829 Species evolve by gradually changing to adapting to their environment Evolutionary relationships among animals Right idea wrong mechanism 1 2 if used body parts become stronger if not they deteriorate Use and disuse and eventually disappear Inheritance of acquired characteristics time by responding to the environment can be passes to their offspring NOT SO the traits that are acquired through life 2 a What is the biological meaning of the term evolution Species change over time and new species arises by the modification of earlier species i e decent with modification b Contrast microevolution with macroevolution Microevolution The gradual evolution of traits within a population of a species over time populations evolve not individuals Macroevolution The evolution of an entirely new species There is no debate over microevolution There is a debate over macroevolution between scientists and creationists 3 Describe explain how each of the following served as evidence at the time of Darwin that evolution could be a means by which life s diversity arose a Artificial selection New species created from common ancestor via selective breeding by humans Different breeds of dogs have arisen by artificial selection selective breeding but are still the same species Canis familaris Microevolution b Comparative Anatomy cation from a common ancestor scended from a common ancestor Comparing the anatomy of different organisms supports the idea of descent with modifi G Buffon 1707 1788 suggested that species could be similar because they de The same bones and their same relative positions in vertebrate forelimbs suggest they evolved from a common ancestor who had this basic ground plan but later evolved different functions Homologous analogous vestigial structures c Geology Adaptive radiation when populations of an ancestral species radiate into several new species each adapted by natural selection to a distinct environment or life style Ex Finches mainland ancestor finch was an insect eater Convergent evolution when unrelated species evolve to look similar not because of common ancestry but because they adapted to similar environments in similar ways Ex Sugar glider and flying squirrel d Paleontology Fossils reveal intermediate species leading to modern species Fossils also reveal other related lineages that did not survive extinct Evolution is not goal oriented e Comparative embryology Early embryos of different vertebrates share many general features As development proceeds similarity persists only among more closely related verte brates E g Reptiles vs Mammals Van Baers s Law 4 a How can molecular biology provide evidence for evolution The more recently two species shared a common ancestor the more similar their pro teins DNA b Provide two examples 1 Percent of amino acids that are identical to those in a human hemoglobin polypeptide human monkey mouse chicken frog lamprey 2 Phylogeny the evolutionary history of living things based on varying degrees of similarity of DNA sequences of the Cytochrome C gene 5 Distinguish between the following providing
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