Upgrade to remove ads
Only $2.99/month

Adaptations and Evolution

Terms in this set (19)

What is any heritable characteristic that increases an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in it's environment?
Adaptation
What is the process by which organisms in nature with variations most suited to their environment survive and leave more offspring (survival of the fittest)?
Natural selection
What are the similar structures that are shared by related species and have been inherited from a common ancestor?
Homologous structures
What structures, inherited from ancestors, have lost much of their original size and function?
Vestigial structures
What structures serve similar functions, but do not share structure and development?
Analogous structures
What occurs when individuals at one end of the curve have higher fitness than individuals elsewhere in the curve?
Directional selection
What occurs when individuals near the center of the curve have higher fitness than individuals at either end?
Stabilizing selection
What occurs when phenotypes at both the upper and lower end of the curve have higher fitness than individuals near the middle?
Disruptive selection
What is the formation of a new species?
Speciation
What links groups of organisms by showing current hypothesis about how evolutionary lines, or lineages, branch off from common ancestors?
Cladogram
What trait arose in the most recent common ancestor of a lineage and was posted and was passed to it's descendants?
Derived character
What experiment suggests that organic compounds necessary for life could have arisen from simpler compounds on a primitive Earth?
Miller-Urey Experiment
What is the process by which organisms change over time as a result of changes in heritable physical or behavioral traits?
Organic evolution
What is the formation of complex organic molecules from simpler inorganic molecules?
Chemical evolution
What theory purposes that organelles in eukaryotic cells were formed when different types of cells joined in a kind of merger?
Endosymbiotic theory
What is the study of the evolutionary history of lineages of organisms?
Phylogeny
What are a group of species that includes a single common ancestor and all descendants of that ancestor?
Clade
What is the random chance that can cause an allele to become more or less common in a population?
Genetic drift
What occurs when two populations are separated by barriers such as rivers, mountains, or other bodies of water?
Geographic isolation
THIS SET IS OFTEN IN FOLDERS WITH...