BIO 400 Exam 3 questions with answers
What is evolution? - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔Heritable change in a population or
species over generational time, and the divergence of lineages from a common source.
What does evolution involve? - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔It is more than just
elimination of inviable forms.
Change is open-ended.
Species are related by descent.
What were the obstacles in evolutionary thinking? - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔1.
Essentialism implies fixed species characteristics.
2. Everyday experience shows us generational continuity, not radical discontinuity.
3. Literal interpretation of religious texts, and a belief in supernatural causation in this
world, can lead to the rejection of all science.
4. Natural theology
5. Incomplete fossil records - Cuvier: fossils show abrupt changes, not gradual
6. The plenitude principle: all species that can exist, do exist. Creation was fully stocked
from the beginning; gaps in creation cannot exist.
7. Many people feared that evolutionary thinking would cause moral and societal chaos
(bible credibility, humans are "mere" animals)
8. Misunderstanding of evolution, misunderstanding of science, misunderstanding of the
meanings of words I.e. the ancestor of crocodiles and ducks equal a crocoduck
,Natural Theology - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔A new term in the 18th and 19th
centuries for the teleological interpretation of organismal function, which goes back to
ancient times.
The most important figure in England: William Paley, author of Natural Theology (1802).
What were the indications of evolutionary change? - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔1.
Linnaean hierarchies and natural groupings
2. Function vs. type similarities (a distinction recognized as long ago as Cuvier) similarity
due to function similarity due to unity of type
3. The sequence of fossils in the stratigraphical column and the reality of extinction (FIND
THE 2 POSSIBILITIES)
4. Spontaneous generation of organisms from amorphous beginnings, like a nutrient broth
5. Natural theology - focussed
attention on adaptation and function, which stimulated the growth of evolutionary
thinking. If we decide not to entertain supernatural explanations in biology, we have to
explain how this functionality appears naturally
6. Inherited variability within species - If species were created to be adapted to their
environments, why should there be any inherited variability at all?
7. Vestigial and inefficient structures - I.e. wisdom teeth
8. Time and environmental change - How could well-adapted organisms remain well-
adapted through long periods of environmental change?
9. The idea of change over time penetrated into European consciousness in a wide array of
fields.
*similarity beyond functional necessity*
How did the idea of change over time penetrate into European consciousness? - **
VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔1. the solar system's formation and evolution
2. a solar arrow of time - exhaustion of the sun's energy stores
, 3. gradual geological changes over long periods of time
4. Similarities among words in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek suggested they were descended
from a common language, now extinct.
Erasmus Darwin - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔1731 - 1802 - Charles Darwins
grandfather
Wrote Zoonomia (1796) set forth a theory of evolution similar to
Lamarck's. His evidence for evolution - such as wisdom teeth
The cause of evolutionary change: "the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent
activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity", that is,
inheritance of characteristics acquired during life.
Concluded that warm-blooded animals were descended from one common ancestor, from
"one living filament, which the great First Cause endowed with animality".
Effort - strengthening - legacy
Lamarck - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔1744 - 1829
He was an accomplished botanist until the age of 50, when he was given a post as a zoologist
at the Museum of Natural History.
He was very productive, and made many contributions to invertebrate zoology.
Lamarcks Ideas - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔Lamarck's evolutionary ideas were
developed in the first years of the 19th century, and were set down in three books.
Zoological Philosophy (1809)
What is evolution? - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔Heritable change in a population or
species over generational time, and the divergence of lineages from a common source.
What does evolution involve? - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔It is more than just
elimination of inviable forms.
Change is open-ended.
Species are related by descent.
What were the obstacles in evolutionary thinking? - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔1.
Essentialism implies fixed species characteristics.
2. Everyday experience shows us generational continuity, not radical discontinuity.
3. Literal interpretation of religious texts, and a belief in supernatural causation in this
world, can lead to the rejection of all science.
4. Natural theology
5. Incomplete fossil records - Cuvier: fossils show abrupt changes, not gradual
6. The plenitude principle: all species that can exist, do exist. Creation was fully stocked
from the beginning; gaps in creation cannot exist.
7. Many people feared that evolutionary thinking would cause moral and societal chaos
(bible credibility, humans are "mere" animals)
8. Misunderstanding of evolution, misunderstanding of science, misunderstanding of the
meanings of words I.e. the ancestor of crocodiles and ducks equal a crocoduck
,Natural Theology - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔A new term in the 18th and 19th
centuries for the teleological interpretation of organismal function, which goes back to
ancient times.
The most important figure in England: William Paley, author of Natural Theology (1802).
What were the indications of evolutionary change? - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔1.
Linnaean hierarchies and natural groupings
2. Function vs. type similarities (a distinction recognized as long ago as Cuvier) similarity
due to function similarity due to unity of type
3. The sequence of fossils in the stratigraphical column and the reality of extinction (FIND
THE 2 POSSIBILITIES)
4. Spontaneous generation of organisms from amorphous beginnings, like a nutrient broth
5. Natural theology - focussed
attention on adaptation and function, which stimulated the growth of evolutionary
thinking. If we decide not to entertain supernatural explanations in biology, we have to
explain how this functionality appears naturally
6. Inherited variability within species - If species were created to be adapted to their
environments, why should there be any inherited variability at all?
7. Vestigial and inefficient structures - I.e. wisdom teeth
8. Time and environmental change - How could well-adapted organisms remain well-
adapted through long periods of environmental change?
9. The idea of change over time penetrated into European consciousness in a wide array of
fields.
*similarity beyond functional necessity*
How did the idea of change over time penetrate into European consciousness? - **
VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔1. the solar system's formation and evolution
2. a solar arrow of time - exhaustion of the sun's energy stores
, 3. gradual geological changes over long periods of time
4. Similarities among words in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek suggested they were descended
from a common language, now extinct.
Erasmus Darwin - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔1731 - 1802 - Charles Darwins
grandfather
Wrote Zoonomia (1796) set forth a theory of evolution similar to
Lamarck's. His evidence for evolution - such as wisdom teeth
The cause of evolutionary change: "the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent
activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity", that is,
inheritance of characteristics acquired during life.
Concluded that warm-blooded animals were descended from one common ancestor, from
"one living filament, which the great First Cause endowed with animality".
Effort - strengthening - legacy
Lamarck - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔1744 - 1829
He was an accomplished botanist until the age of 50, when he was given a post as a zoologist
at the Museum of Natural History.
He was very productive, and made many contributions to invertebrate zoology.
Lamarcks Ideas - ** VERIFIED ANSWERS **✔✔Lamarck's evolutionary ideas were
developed in the first years of the 19th century, and were set down in three books.
Zoological Philosophy (1809)
