Chapter 13, 14, & 15 – Flashcards

The technique called radiometric dating is based on

The Mesozoic era is often called the age of reptiles. Which of the following also occurred during this era?

Under the biological species concept, a species is a group of organisms that

Genetic differences between populations tend to be reduced by

One of the key contributions of the punctuated equilibrium model is that it helps explain

The ultimate source of all new alleles is

Which of the following options lists taxonomic categories in the correct order from most specific to most general?

Who developed a theory of evolution almost identical to Darwin's?

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. The others are green, a characteristic determined by a dominant allele. A hurricane on the island kills most of the birds from this population. Only 10 remain, and those birds all have yellow feathers. T/F. The hurricane has caused a population bottleneck and a loss of genetic diversity.

A group of ants escaped from a picnic basket carried to the top of a mountain and thrived in this area where there were no other ants. Many years later descendants of these ants crawled into a picnic basket on the mountain and traveled back to the valley from which their ancestors had come. Which of these observations would cause you to conclude that the ants on top of the mountain had become a different species from those in the valley?

Which of the following would a biologist describe as microevolution?

Some butterflies can ingest toxic chemicals from the milkweed plants they feed on and then can store those chemicals in their body. Because toxins stored in the butterflies are toxic to birds, the birds avoid eating the butterflies. Which of the following is the best explanation for this situation?

If all of Earth's history were compressed into an hour, humans would first appear less than

In the three-domain system, the eukaryotes are represented

Scientists believe that a major factor promoting the adaptive radiation of mammals was probably

Which of the following options lists major events in the history of life on Earth in the proper order, from earliest to most recent?

Which of the following disciplines has found evidence for evolution based on the native distributions (locations) of living species?

Darwin found that many of the species on the Galápagos islands

Over a span of several thousand years, a number of species show adaptations to climate change: Drier, warmer conditions select for succulent vegetation and deep taproots in plants, burrowing in mammals and amphibians, and other similar adaptive changes. What will happen if the climate shifts in the opposite direction and becomes progressively wetter and cooler?