Chapter 13

Darwin found that many of the species on the Galapagos Islands

Resembled species on the nearest mainland

Resembled species from Australia

Resembled species in Europe

Were identical to South American species

Lyell's book Principles of Geology, which Darwin read on board the H.M.S. Beagle, argued in favor of which of the following concepts?

Meteorite impacts may have been a major cause of periodic mass extinctions

Earth's surface is shaped by natural forces that act gradually and are still acting

Earth's surface is shaped mainly by occasional catastrophic events

The processes that shape Earth today are very different from those that were at work in the past

During the 1950, a scientist named Lysenko tried to solve the food shortages in the Soviet Union by breeding wheat that could grow in Siberia. He theorized that if individual wheat plants were exposed to cold, they would develop additional cold tolerance and pass it to their offspring. Based on the ideas of artificial and natural selection, do you think this project worked as planned?

Yes, the wheat probably evolved better cold tolerance over time through inheritance of acquired characteristics.

No, because Lysenko took his wheat seeds straight to Siberia instead of exposing them incrementally to cold

Yes, because this is generally the method used by plant breeders to develop new crops

No, because there was no process of selection based on inherited traits. Lysenko assumed that exposure could induce a plant to develop additional cold tolerance and that this tolerance would be passed to the plant's offspring

Which of the following thinkers argued that much of human suffering was the result of human populations increasing faster than food supply, an argument that later influenced Charles Darwin's ideas of natural selection?

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Thomas Malthus

Gregor Mendel

Charles Lyell

A dog breeder wishes to develop a breed that does not bark. She starts with a diverse mixture of dogs. Generation after generation, she allows only the quietest dogs to breed. After 30 years of work she has a new breed of dog with interesting traits, but on average, the dogs still bark at about the same rate as other dog breeds. Which of the following would be a logical explanation for her failure?

The tendency to bark is not a heritable trait

There is no variation for the trait (barking)

The selection was artificial, not natural, so it did not produce evolutionary change

There was no selection (differential reproductive success) related to barking behavior

A population is

All individuals of a species, regardless of location or time period in which they live

A group of individuals of the same species that live in the same area and interbreed

A group of individuals of a species plus all of the other species with which they interact

A group of individuals of different species living in the same place at the same time

Microevolution, or evolution at its smallest scale, occurs when

A population's allele frequencies change over a span of generations

A new species arises from an existing species

An individual's traits change in response to environmental factors

A community of organisms changes due to the extinction of several dominant species

Imagine that you are studying a very large population of moths that is isolated from gene flow. A single gene controls wing color. Half of the moths have white-spotted wings (genotype WW or Ww) and half of the moths have plain brown wings (ww). There are no new mutations, individuals mate randomly, and there is no natural selection on wing color. How will p, the frequency of the dominant allele, change over time?

P will neither increase nor decrease; it will remain more or less constant under the conditions described

P will fluctuate rapidly and randomly because of genetic drift

P will decrease because of genetic drift

P will increase; the dominant allele will eventually take over and become most common in the population

A population of 1,000 birds exists on a small Pacific island. Some of the birds are yellow, a characteristic determined by a recessive allele. A hurricane on the island kills most of the birds from this population. Only ten remain, and those birds all have yellow feathers. Which of the following statements is true?

Assuming that no new birds come to the island and no mutations occur, future generations of this population will contain both green and yellow birds.

The ten remaining birds will mate only with each other, and this will contribute to gene flow in the population.

The hurricane has caused a population bottleneck and a loss of genetic diversity

This situation illustrates the effect of a mutation effect

Thirty people are selected for a long-term mission to colonize a planet many light years away from Earth. The mission is successful and the population rapidly grows to several hundred individuals. However, certain genetic diseases are unusually common in this group, and their gene pool is quite different from that of the Earth population. Which of the following phenomena has left its mark on this population?

High rates of mutation

Natural selection

Bottleneck effect

Founder effect

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