Chapter 20 Quiz

Quiz Content

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. Microevolution involves _______, whereas macroevolution involves _______.

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. Almost all of the genes affecting the development of feathers are found in crocodilians. What can we conclude from this observation?

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. Critical characteristics that distinguish most mammals from their reptile-like ancestors do not include

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. Which scenario represents a case of a saltation resulting in a "hopeful monster"?

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. Refer to the figure showing the evolutionary morphology of two different taxa.



The figure demonstrates

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. In many reptiles, locomotor muscles insert on the ribs, limiting the ability of the organisms to breathe while running. However, in birds and mammals the muscle insertions have shifted to processes on the vertebrae. How does this change facilitate evolutionary novelty?

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. Creationist opponents of evolution cite the complexity of the eye as a feature that would be impossible to have been produced by evolution. Even Darwin wrote, "That the eye, with all of its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree." Why are creationists wrong and how has this been resolved?

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. The "genetic toolkit" consists of

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. Why might a species' "optimal" phenotype remain unchanged for long periods of time, resulting in apparent evolutionary stasis?

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. Cycadophyta is a group of plants with a small number of extant species, but are well known from fossils from the Mesozoic era. Living "cycads" are nearly identical to fossils. What best explains these "living fossils"?

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. The hypothesis of punctuated equilibrium is controversial because

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. How can speciation enhance the rate of adaptive evolution?

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. Cope's rule, that animals tend to increase in size over evolutionary time, is a(n)

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. Why are colonies of social insects, like termites, sometimes referred to as superorganisms?

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. Stephen Jay Gould suggested that if we were to replay the "tape of life," the course of events that we know as "history" might play themselves out very differently. Which statement supports this idea?

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. How do evolutionary biologists view the notion of biological "progress"?

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