Winter 2015 Midterm Study questions

The following questions are meant to guide your studying. Dont turn in your answers to these
questions. Use them to help you study. Most of the questions on the midterm will be taken from
these subjects, although will not be word for word repetitions of the review questions (i.e. if you
memorize the answers to all of these doesnt necessarily mean youll do fine). There is the
possibility though, that some of the short essay questions may be slightly modified versions of
these questions... Remember, we test on comprehension, not just whether you can regurgitate
back the answers to these questions. The midterm will cover through the lecture on Thursday
1/29.
Week 1
1. What are the premises of natural selection?
2. How are ecology and evolution related?
3. What are some lines of evidence for evolution that can be seen in the evolution of whales?
4. What were the molecular and morphological hypotheses about whale origins? What resolved
this discrepancy?
5. What is the difference between homology and analogy?
6. What are some unique cetacean characters?
7. How are vestigial structures explained by evolution?
8. Why are early whale fossils found in India and Pakistan?
9. How can development (i.e., ontogeny) inform us about evolution?
10. Name two individuals and/or cultures who had thought about evolutionary change prior to
Darwin, and describe their ideas.
11. Describe how the economist Thomas Malthus inspired Darwin to formulate his theory of
evolution by means of natural selection.
12. Describe one example of evolution that occurs on a time scale short enough for us to observe
it.
13. Explain how Lamarck was right about evolution, and how he was wrong.
14. What is "nervous fluid," what was its proposed function, and who came up with the idea?
15. What did Darwin and many other nineteenth-century scientists consider to be the origin of
variation? How is this different from modern evolutionary biology?
Week 2
1. What are some different types of fossils?
2. What happens to an organism from the time it dies to the time it's exhumed as a fossil? What
is the study of this process called?
3. What is 'uniformitarianism'?
4. What are some rules for determining relative ages?
5. What are index fossils and what are they used for?
6. How long ago did life start? What is some evidence of this early life?
7. Give the dates for the following time spans: Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic, Phanerozoic.
8. Define the following terms and give examples: heterotroph, autotroph, eukaryote, prokaryote.
9. How might one test various hypotheses of evolution as described by alternative phylogenies?
10. Why did much of Linnaean taxonomy work even though he preferred the idea of special
creation over evolution?

11. Describe a primitive character, and why it's incorrect to refer to a species/taxon as being
primitive.
12. Describe a situation where character loss can be informative for building a phylogeny, and
one where it is not.
13. Discuss the importance of distinguishing between convergence and homology when building
phylogenies.
14. When natural selection stops selecting for a particular character, what are two ways in which
that character may eventually be lost? Which situation causes the character to be lost more
quickly?
15. How are taxonomic classification and phylogenetics the same? How are they different?
Week 3
1. What are p and q, and how do they relate to genotype frequencies in a population?
2. What is Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium, and what are the conditions for it to be true?
3. How does nonrandom mating affect genotype frequencies in cases of consanguinity, and how
does this relate to fitness?
4. What is genetic drift, and why does it affect small populations more than large ones?
5. What is a random walk, and how does it relate to genetic drift?
6. What are founder effects and population bottlenecks and how do they relate to conservation of
endangered species?
7. Explain the experiment that was done on bacteria to demonstrate selection. How is it similar
to the situation involving Darwin's finches that the Grants studied.
8. Why is "junk DNA" a terrible name for DNA that does not code for proteins?
9. Explain how the idea of blending inheritance created a problem for Darwin's theory of natural
selection.
10. Describe at least 5 different types of mutations (hint: a single nucleotide substitution is the
most simple).
11. How does an X-linked recessive allele affect men and women differently?
12. What is pangenesis?
13. Name and briefly describe the 3 laws of Mendelian inheritance.
14. How is codominance different from incomplete dominance?
15. Compare and contrast the difference between a prokaryotic and eukaryotic genome.
Week 4
1. How do the stories of the peppered moth and DDT resistance in mosquitos illustrate the
premises of natural selection? What experiment from the book is the peppered moth example
most similar to?
2. What are some constraints on the power of selection?
3. What are the modes of selection, and how will they affect the variation of a continuous trait in
a population?
4. Sickle-cell is an example of balancing selection; what does this mean?
5. How are drift and selection related? When is one or the other stronger?
6. Why is gene duplication the first step in adaptation? Give an example of this that we talked
about in class.

7. What are HOX genes?

8. How does the evolution of flippers in aquatic tetrapods illustrate that evolution is a tinkerer?
9. Explain the evolution of the human eye.
10. What's the difference between a cladogram, a phylogram, and a chronogram?
11. Describe why life-history traits can be useful for discerning evolutionary relationships and
give an example.
12. What was the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis?
13. Explain Kimura's Neutral Theory and the evidence behind his argument.
14. How do the following change probabilities of allele fixation via genetic drift: (a) population
size, (b) starting allele frequency, and (c) time?
15. Draw a 5-taxon cladogram and label one tip, one branch, and one node.
16. Explain how a phylogram can be converted to a chronogram.
17. What is meant by the term molecular clock?