BIOL467 Evolution Study Guide Exam 1 PDF

BIOL467: Evolution. This is a study guide for Exam 1. Please study the lecture notes, hand- outs, in-class assignments, and home-work assignments as well. Topic 1: Introduction: 1. Define biological evolution. 2. List and describe the 5 necessary components for evolution to occur. Be able to appl...

BIOL467: Evolution. This is a study guide for Exam 1. Please study the lecture notes, hand- outs, in-class assignments, and home-work assignments as well. Topic 1: Introduction: 1. Define biological evolution. 2. List and describe the 5 necessary components for evolution to occur. Be able to apply this to a real-life system. 3. How is the creation of modern dog breeds an example of evolution? 4. What other examples of artificial selection can you come up with? Topic 2: Case Study – HIV/AIDS + COVID 1. Review the natural history of HIV. Review the life history of the retrovirus HIV. 2. For HIV patients, why is it necessary to take a “cocktail” of drugs? What do the HIV medications target? Why is it difficult to design effective medication to combat HIV? 3. Describe the importance of a correlation between transmission of HIV between cells within a host and between hosts, and the significance that has to virulence. 4. What is the significance of the delta 32 allele of the CCR5 co-receptor? What hypotheses may explain the geographic range of people with delta 32? 5. What taxa do we think transmitted the HIV virus to humans, and how do we know? 6. What is the current hypothesis for when humans originally acquired HIV? What is the evolutionary analyses that led us to know when?? 77. Think about the present COVID pandemic and what an evolutionary biologist could discover about it. Ideas can be found in our lecture notes. Topic 3: History 1. Who is regarded as the first person to publish a theory of evolution? What were the main ideas about the mechanisms of his theory? How does this relate to the length of giraffe’s necks? 2. Charles Darwin is considered the “Father of Natural Selection”. What people and experiences helped him to develop this theory? What other historical figures may have influenced him? 3. What is the Modern Synthesis? Who are the major players and their main ideas/findings? 4. Why should Charles Darwin be called the “Father of Natural Selection” and not the “Father of Evolution”. Page 1 of 3 Topic 4: Phylogenies 1. Review how to read trees and look over the activity. Know how to identify closely or distantly related taxa and common ancestors. 2. Define homologous and analogous characters. Which are used for building phylogenies? Be able to identify homologous and analogous characters on a phylogenetic tree. 3. Define parsimony and describe its use for building phylogenies. 4. Did humans evolve from chimpanzees? Topic 5: Evolution of Life History Traits 1. The study of life history traits are various ways different organisms (or species) allocate ____ and _____ to fundamental activities like survival and reproduction. 2. Identify variation in between species number of offspring, and give examples. 3. Identify variation in between species number of offspring and give examples. 4. What is a Darwinian Devil? Why does a Darwinian Devil not exist? 5. Describe trade-offs in life history traits. 6. What is senescence? 7. How do we measure ageing? 8. Describe Lack’s optimal clutch size hypothesis. Is this always true? Why or why not? 9. How can living for a shorter period of time be selected for? 10. What did Dr. Avis find out about life history trait trade-offs of flies with various mitochondrial types in Drosophila simulans? Page 2 of 3 11. Fill out, and understand, the following life table: Life History Traits: matures at age 1, has 5 offspring per year for each age class, but dies at age 4 before reproducing, and has an annual rate of survival = 0.5: Age Fraction of individual Reproductive Success Expected Reproductive Surviving of Survivors Success of Individuals 0 1 2 3 4 5 Expected lifetime reproductive success: Note: there will be a life history table problem on the exam. Please know how to fill out this table. 13. Describe David Lack’s ideas about optimal clutch size? What is the relationship between clutch size, survival, and reproductive success? 14. Do Great Tits (Parus major) lay the optimal # of eggs? What is the evidence? 15. When studying clutch size in birds (and insects too!), is looking at one breeding season enough when thinking of optimal clutch size and reproductive success. Evidence? 16. What is the relationship between resources as a juvenile and reproductive success in Collard Flycatchers? How was this studied? 17. What is the concept of parent offspring conflict? Evidence? Page 3 of 3