Exam 13: How Populations Evolve

A farmer decides to go into the business of raising trout for tourists who enjoy fishing. She builds six trout ponds and stocks each of them with trout from genetically identical stock. Her friends tell her that because she started each pond with just a few trout, she has created a bottleneck effect and her trout populations are likely to become genetically different rapidly. Which of the following statements about her trout is likely true?

The core theme of biology, which explains both the unity and diversity of life, is

Which of the following assumptions or observations is not part of Darwin's idea of natural selection?

Which of the following statements regarding the currently available fossil record is false?

Which of the following represents a pair of homologous structures?

After reading the paragraph below, answer the questions that follow. Desert pupfish live in springs of the American Southwest. Today there are about 30 species of pupfish, but they all evolved from a common Pleistocene ancestor. The southwestern United States was once much wetter than it is now, and the Pleistocene pupfish flourished over a wide geographic area. Over thousands of years, however, the Sierra Nevada mountain range was pushed upward by geological forces, blocking rainfall from the Pacific Ocean. As the large lakes dried up, small groups of pupfish remained in springs and pools fed by groundwater seepage. Now, although many of these small springs still have pupfish, each population, through evolution, has become very different from populations of pupfish in other springs. -If, in one population of pupfish all of the individuals have a blood pigment that is extraordinarily effective at carrying oxygen, but this trait is not seen in any of the other populations, what likely happened?

-The change in curves in the graph represents

Which of the following best expresses the concept of natural selection?

Blue-footed boobies have webbed feet and are comically clumsy when they walk on land. Evolutionary scientists view these feet as

Which of the following conditions would tend to make the Hardy-Weinberg equation more accurate for predicting the genotype frequencies of future generations in a population of a sexually reproducing species?

Mate-attracting features such as the bright plumage of a male peacock result from

Which of the following would most quickly be eliminated by natural selection?

Which of the following statements regarding fins on fishes is true?

Which of the following terms represents the frequency of heterozygotes in a population that is in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium?

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 the group's gene pool is quite different from that of the Earth population they have left behind. Which of the following phenomena has left its mark on this population?

If you were just diagnosed with a serious bacterial disease, which of these would predict the most positive outcome for treatment? The disease was acquired

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?

Large antlers in male elk, which are used for battles between males, are a good example of a trait favored by

An elk herd is observed over many generations. Most of the full-grown bull elk have antlers of nearly the same size, although a few have antlers that are significantly larger or smaller than this average size. The average antler size remains constant over the generations. Which of the following effects probably accounts for this situation?

Frequency-dependent selection, as seen in the case of the scale-eating fish in Lake Tanganyika, tends to