Quick Quiz
It looks like your students have some questions about Microevolution. Reflect on what you have just learned and see how well you can respond. Just click on their raised hands!
You could respond:
“Not at all. By the time Darwin came along it was well known
that life had been on Earth for an immense amount of time and had changed through time. Darwin’s contribution was a
mechanism for evolution—natural selection.”
You could respond:
“Well, I think that there are longer words, but
uniformitarianism is important in that it suggests that the forces of change that we see today are the same as in the
past. Mountains erode, volcanoes erupt and earthquakes rend the earth, today just as in the past. Thus, the forces
of today can be used to explain what occurred in the past.”
You could respond:
“Yes, it will definitely be there. Endosymbiosis is very
important in the early evolution of cells. While it appears that all life began as relatively simple bacteria, a number
of lines of bacteria fused to form early eukaryotic cells, resulting in most of the life we are familiar with today,
including us.”
You could respond:
“No, the Modern Synthesis is the combining of genetics,
paleontology, systematics, and many other sciences to develop one powerful explanation of evolution.”
You could respond:
“The law of superposition tells us that what got there
first is on the bottom and the more recently arrived materials are piled on top. This principle, which now seems so
obvious, was a major breakthrough in sequencing the history of life and is vital today in determining both relative
and absolute dates for fossils.”
You could respond:
“Biogeography was the first clue. People found fossils of identical plants and animals on opposite sides of the Atlantic that couldn’t possibly have traveled there on their own.”
You could respond:
“No. Lamarck was a smart guy who proposed a theory of evolution. Although he got his mechanisms wrong, he really got people thinking about the possibility that life evolved over time.”
You could respond:
“Mendel’s experiments demonstrated the laws of inheritance. Later researchers were able to explain the physical basis of these laws.”
