Evolution Vocabulary

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Changeover time

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Evolution

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Preservedremains of living things

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Fossil

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Selectivebreeding of plants/animals to promote the occurrence of desirable traits inoffspring.

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Artificial Selection

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Heritablecharacteristic that increases an organism abilityto survive.

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Adaption

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How well an organism can survive andreproduce in its environment.

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Fitness

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Organisms that are most suited to their environment survive andreproduce most successfully

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Natural Selection

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Studyof past and present distribution of organisms

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Biogeography

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Structuresthat are similar in different species of common ancestry.

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Homologous Structure

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Body parts that share a commonfunction, but not structure.

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Analogous Structure

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Structurethat is inherited from ancestors but has lost much or all of its originalfunction.

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Vestigial Structure

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All the genes, including all the different alleles for each gene, that are present in apopulation.

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Gene Pool

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Number of times that an allele occursin a gene pool compared with the number of alleles in that pool for the samegene.

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Allele Frequency

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Trait controlled by one gene that hastwo alleles.

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Single Gene Trait

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Traitcontrolled by two or more genes.

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Polygenic Trait

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Individuals at one end of a distribution curvehave higher fitness than individuals in the middle or at the other end of thecurve .

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Directional Selection

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Individuals near the center of the distributioncurve have higher fitness than individuals at either end of the curve.

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Stabilization Selection

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Individuals at the upper and lower ends of the curve havehigher fitness than individuals near the middle of the curve.

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Disruptive Selection

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Randomchange in allele frequency caused by a series of chance occurrences that causean allele to become more or less common in a population.

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Genetic Drift

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A change in allele frequency following a dramatic reduction in the size of apopulation.

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Bottleneck Effect

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Change in allele frequencies as a resultof migration of a small subgroup of a population.

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Founder Effect

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Situationin which allele frequencies in a population don't change.

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Genetic Equilibrium

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Principlethat states the allele frequencies in a population remain constant unless oneor more factors cause those frequencies to change.

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Hardy Weinberg Principle

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When individuals select mates basedon heritable traits.

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Sexual Selection

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Group of similar organisms that canbreed and produce fertile offspring.

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Species

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Formationof a new species.

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Speciation

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Separation of a species or populationso that they no longer interbreed and evolve into two separate species.

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Reproductive Isolation

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Isolation in which two populations develop differences incourtship rituals or other behaviors that prevent them from breeding.

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Behavioral Isolation

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Isolation inwhich two populations are separated by geographic barriers such as rivers ans mountains leading to the formation of two separatesubspecies.

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Geographic Isolation

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Reproductive isolation in which two or more species reproduces at differenttimes.

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Temporal Isolation

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Methodused by researchers that uses mutation rates in DNA to estimate the length oftime that two species have been evolving independently.

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Molecular Clock