Question

Question 5

Which of the following is FALSE:

Natural selection has foresight, and can mold organisms in accordance with environments in the far future. This is why organisms have a good "fit" to their environments long after they have arisen through speciation.

Selection is an undirected process that can only ever work with the materials at hand.

Human beings have foresight because they possess brains that can think about possible outcomes and the consequences of actions. This is different to a process like natural selection.

The fact that natural selection has no foresight does not mean that it is incapable of producing beings that have foresight.

Question 6

The wings of bats, birds and flying insects are examples of:

Convergently evolved traits (at least in terms of their basic functionality).

Homologous traits.

Plesiomorphies.

None of the above.

Question 7

The effect of a trait depends on the environment because:

Organisms decide to change their behavior every so often to evade predators.

It is only ever in the context of an environment that these traits can exist, and whether they assist the organism or inhibit it will depend on the particularities of that environment in which it must interact.

Sexual selection will not tolerate wasteful and extravagant displays.

The environment is changing too fast for the organism to keep up with in terms of its conscious appreciation of it, so it must rely on its traits to do the work.

Question 8

Which of the following is TRUE:

Natural selection is not random; mutation is random; speciation is necessarily driven by natural selection.

Natural selection is not random; mutation is random; speciation is not necessarily driven by natural selection.

Natural selection is random; drift is random; speciation is not necessarily driven by natural selection.

Natural selection is not random; mutation is random; speciation must occur through the evolution of pre-zygotic barriers to mating.

Question 9

Heritability is:

The same as inheritance.

Another way of stating the degree to which a trait is genetic (for example, you could say that the color of your skin is "80 percent genetic and 20 percent environmental")

The proportion of variance of a trait in a population that is attributable to genetic variance in that population.

Present in populations, but not necessary for evolution by natural selection.