Evolutiono chart vocabulary
Terms
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- adaptation
- an inherited trait that increases an organism's chance of survival in a particular environment.
- survival of the fittest
- natural selection conceived of as a stuggle for life in which only those organism best adapted to existing conditions are able to survive and reproduce.
- divergent evolution
- the process of which two or more related species become more and more dissimilar.
- adaptive radiation
- an evolutionarypattern in which many species evolve from a single ancestral species.
- Punctuated equilibrium
- a theory that speciation occurs during brief periods of rapid genetic change.
- fitness
- a measurment of the ability of a species to respond to the pressures of natural selection; the ability of individuals to survive to propagate their genes.
- Mass extinction
- one of the brief periods of time during which large numbers of species diappeared.
- convergent evoulution
- the process by which inrelated species become more similar as they adapt to the same kind of environment.
- Evoultion
- descent with modification.
- vestigial structure
- referring to a functionless structure that was functional in an ancestral species.
- directional selection
- individuals that display a more extreme form of a trait have greater fitness than individuals with an average form of the trait.
- natural selection
- the process by which organisms with favorable variations reproduce at higher rates than those without such variations.
- disruptive selection
- a type of natural selection in which individuals with two extremeforms of a trait have an advantage.
- coevoltuion
- the mutual evolution of two different species interacting with each other.
- genetic drift
- a shift in allele frequencies in a population due to chance.
- radioactive dating
- a method of determining the age of an object by measuring the amount of a specific radioactive isotope it contains.
- Relative dating
- the proper chronological placement of a feature, object, or happening in the geologic time scale without reference to its absolute age.
- Macroevolution
- large scale evoltuion over geologic time that results inthe formatin of new traxonomic groups.
- homologous features
- similar features that originated in a shared ancestor.
- genetic equilibirum
- allele frequencis in a population tend to remain the same from generation to generation unless acted on by outiside influences.
- stabilizing selection
- a type of natural selection in which the average form of a trait causes an organism to have an adavantage in reproduction.
- reproductive isolation speciation
- the inability of formerly interbreeding organsims to produce offspring.
- founder effect
- when a small group of individuals breaks off a from big population and makes a new population. Chance plays a big role in determining which alleles are represented in the new population.
- gene pool
- all the genes for all the traits in a population.
- relative frequency
- the ratio of the number of observations in a statistical categroy of the total number of observations.
- fossils
- the remains or traces of once living organisms.
- microevolution
- evolution resulting from a succession of relatively small genetic variations that often cause the formation of new subspecies.
- hardy weinberg of genetic equilibrium
- the stability of gene frequencies across generations.