Evolution Terms - AP Biology Flashcards

7708492011	Allopatric speciation	The formation of new species in populations that are geographically isolated from one another	0
7708492012	Artificial selection	The selective breeding of domesticated plants and animals to encourage the occurrence of desirable traits	1
7708492013	Biogeography	The study of the past and present geographic distribution of species	2
7708492014	Bottleneck effect	Genetic drift that occurs when the size of a population is reduced, as by a natural disaster or human actions	3
7708492015	Cambrian explosion	A relatively brief time in geologic history when many present-day phyla of animals first appeared in the fossil record	4
7708492016	Clades	A group of species that includes an ancestral species and all of its descendants	5
7708492017	Cline	A graded change in a character along a geographic axis	6
7708492018	Continental drift	The slow movement of the continental plates across Earth's surface	7
7708492019	Convergent evolution	The evolution of similar features in independent evolutionary lineages	8
7708492020	Endosymbiosis	A process in which a unicellular organism engulfs another cell, which lives within the host cell and ultimately becomes an organelle in the host cell	9
7708492021	Founder effect	Genetic drift that occurs when a few individuals become isolated from a larger population and form a new population whose gene pool composition is not reflective of that of the original population	10
7708492022	Gene flow	The transfer of alleles from one population to another, resulting from the movement of fertile individuals or their gametes	11
7708492023	Genetic drift	A process in which chance events cause unpredictable fluctuations in allele frequencies from one generation to the next	12
7708492024	Geologic record	The division of Earth's history into time periods, grouped into three eons (Achaean, Proterozoic, Phanerozoic) and further subdivided into eras, periods, and epochs	13
7708492025	Hardy-Weinberg principle	The principle that frequencies of alleles and genotypes in a population remain constant from generation to generation, provided that only Mendelian segregation and recombination of alleles are at work	14
7708492026	Heterozygous advantage	Greater reproductive success of heterozygous individuals compared with homozygotes and tends to preserve variation in a gene pool	15
7708492027	Homologous structures	Structures in different species that are similar because of common ancestry	16
7708492028	Macroevolution	Evolutionary change above the species level	17
7708492029	Microevolution	Evolutionary change below the species level; change in the allele frequencies in a population over generations	18
7708492030	Natural selection	A process in which individuals that have certain inherited traits tend to survive and reproduce at higher rates than other individuals because of those traits	19
7708492031	Neutral variation	Genetic variation that does not provide a selective advantage of disadvantage	20
7708492032	Paedomorphosis	The retention in an adult organism of the juvenile features of its evolutionary ancestors	21
7708492033	Phylogenic tree	A branching diagram that represents a hypothesis about the evolutionary history of a group of organisms	22
7708492034	Punctuated equilibria	In the fossil record, long periods of apparent stasis, in which a species undergoes little or no morphological change, interrupted by relatively brief periods of sudden change	23
7708492035	Radiometric dating	A method for determining the absolute age of rocks and fossils, based on the half-life of radioactive isotopes	24
7708492036	Ribozymes	An RNA molecule that functions as an enzyme, such as an intron that catalyzes its own removal during RNA splicing	25
7708492037	Speciation	An evolutionary process in which one species splits into two or more species	26
7708492038	Sympatric speciation	The formation of new species in populations that live in the same geographic area	27