AP Biology Chapter 19 Flashcards

4987647204	Evolution	- Descent with modification. - Process consists of the mechanisms that produce the observed pattern of change.	0
4987647205	Aristotle	- Believed life forms can be arranged on the scala naturae, increasing in complexity. - Believed that organisms were fixed.	1
4987647206	Lamarck	1. Use & disuse- parts of the body that are used extensively become larger and stronger, while those that are not used deteriorate. - Ex. A giraffe stretching its neck to reach leaves on higher branches. 2. Inheritance of acquired characteristics- An organism can pass down these modifications to its offspring. - Evolution occurs because organisms have an innate drive to become more complex.	2
4987647207	Darwin	- Voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle - He observed geologic change and concluded that physical evidence did not support the traditional view that the earth was only a few thousand years old. - He found that organisms on the Galapagos Islands were similar to those on the South American mainland.	3
4987647208	Natural Selection	- The process in which individuals that have certain inherited traits tend to survive and reproduce at higher rates that other individuals because of those traits. - Can amplify or diminish only heritable traits that differ among the individuals in a population.	4
4987647209	Descent with modification	- Unity of life- All organisms are descended from a common ancestor. - Descendents acquired diverse adaptations because of living in different environments. - Life= tree with branches from a common trunk, each fork represents most recent c. ancestor.	5
4987647210	Thomas Malthus	- Human suffering- disease, famine, and war resulted from the human population's potential to increase faster than food supplies and other resources.	6
4987647211	Survival of the fittest	- Organisms that are best adapted to their environment will have offspring and pass down their traits.	7
4987647212	Homology	- Similarity resulting from common ancestry.	8
4987647213	Homologous structures	- Structures that represent variations on a structural theme in a group of animas that was present in their common ancestor. - Ex. Arms, forelegs, flippers and wings of different mammals.	9
4987647214	Vestigial Structures	- Remnants of features that served a function in the organism's ancestors. - Ex. some snake skeletons retain vestiges of the pelvis and leg bones of walking ancestors.	10
4987647215	Comparative biochemistry	- All forms of life use the same genetic language of DNA and RNA- genetic code is essentially universal. - Likely that all species descended from common ancestors that used this code.	11
4987647216	The Fossil Record	- Documents the pattern of evolution- past organisms differed from present-day organisms & shows that many species have become extinct. - Shows that descent with modification produced increasingly large differences among related groups of organisms, ultimately resulting in the diversity of life.	12
4987647217	Biogeography	- The scientific study of the geographic distributions of species.	13