The following are examples of the kind of questions that will
appear on the final exam:
Thomas Malthus’ book influenced Darwin’s development of his natural selection theory and stated that:
a) Mutations are usually beneficial.
b) Human populations can increase exponentially while food supply grows arithmetically.
c) Offspring inherit characteristics that their parents acquired during their lifetimes.
d) Both geological and biological processes have proceeded at the same rates through time.
e) The ordering of fossils in geological strata indicate their relative ages.
Not all living organisms use:
a) A carbon-based chemistry
b) The DNA-RNA-protein operating system
c) Nearly the same genetic code
d) Alternative splicing
e) None of the above
All of the following statements are part of Darwin’s theory of evolution except:
a) Heritable variations occur in natural populations.
b) All organisms are descended from one or a few common ancestors.
c) Characteristics acquired during the life of an individual are passed on to its offspring.
d) Species are not fixed but change over time
e) Life has a long evolutionary history.
New alleles of a gene arise in a population by:
a) mutation
b) genetic drift
c) directional selection
d) random mating
e) survival of the fittest
Which of the following statements about the predictions of the Neutral Theory of evolution is/are true?
a) Neutral evolution predicts that functionally important DNA (e.g. the gene for a ribosome) evolves more slowly than functionally unimportant DNA (e.g. junk DNA)
b) Neutral evolution predicts that, because of the redundancy of the genetic code, the 3rd position within codons of protein coding genes will evolve faster than the other positions.
c) Neutral evolution implies that the same gene will evolve faster in a small population than in a large population
d) Both (a) and (b) are true
e) All of (a), (b) and (c) are true
Back
to the Evolutionary Genomics Course.