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Unit 7 - Islas
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Evolution | Change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. |
| Evolutionary Fitness | The quantitative representation of natural and sexual selection within evolutionary biology. |
| Natural Selection | The differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. |
| Selective Pressure | External agents which affect an organism's ability to survive in a given environment. |
| Adaptive Radiation | A process in which organisms diversify rapidly from an ancestral species into a multitude of new forms, particularly when a change in the environment makes new resources available, alters biotic interactions or opens new environmental niches. |
| Biological Species Concept | A species taxon as a group of organisms that can successfully interbreed and produce fertile offspring. |
| Divergent Evolution | The accumulation of differences between closely related populations within a species, leading to speciation. |
| Gradualism | A hypothesis, a theory or a tenet assuming that change comes about gradually or that variation is gradual in nature and happens over time as opposed to in large steps. |
| Punctuated Equilibrium | The hypothesis that evolutionary development is marked by isolated episodes of rapid speciation between long periods of little or no change. |
| Reproductive Isolation | A collection of evolutionary mechanisms, behaviors and physiological processes critical for speciation. |
| Speciation | The evolutionary process by which populations evolve to become distinct species. |
| Ecosystems | A community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment, interacting as a system. |
| Extinction | When species are diminished because of environmental forces or because of evolutionary changes in their members. |
| Niche | The match of a species to a specific environmental condition. |
| Species Diversity | The number and relative abundance of species found in a given biological organisation. |
| RNA World Hypothesis | Suggests that life on Earth began with a simple RNA molecule that could copy itself. |
| Convergent Evolution | The independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time. |
| Bottleneck Effect | An extreme example of genetic drift that happens when the size of a population is severely reduced. |
| Founder Effect | The reduction in genetic variation that results when a small subset of a large population is used to establish a new colony. |
| Genetic Drift | The change in the frequency of an existing gene variant in a population due to random sampling of organisms. |
| Mutation | An alteration in the nucleotide sequence of the genome of an organism, virus, or extrachromosomal DNA. |
| Population | A group of individuals of the same species living and interbreeding within a given area. |
| Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium | States that allele and genotype frequencies in a population will remain constant from generation to generation in the absence of other evolutionary influences. |
| Migration | A pattern of behavior in which animals travel from one habitat to another in search of food, better conditions, or reproductive needs. |
| Null Hypothesis | An assumption or proposition where an observed difference between two samples of a statistical population is purely accidental and not due to systematic causes. |
| Fossil | The preserved remains, or traces of remains, of ancient organisms. |
| Isotope | Different forms of the same element that have the same number of protons, but a different number of neutrons. |
| Morphology | A branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features. |
| Vestigial Structure | Structures that have no apparent function and appear to be residual parts from a past ancestor. |
| Cladogram | A branching diagram showing the cladistic relationship between a number of species. |
| Lineage | Sequences of biological entities connected by ancestry-descent relationships. |
| Molecular Clock | The average rate at which a species' genome accumulates mutations, used to measure their evolutionary divergence and in other calculations. |
| Out-Group | A lineage that falls outside the clade being studied but is closely related to that clade. |
| Phylogenetic Tree | A diagram that depicts the lines of evolutionary descent of different species, organisms, or genes from a common ancestor. |
| Phylogeny | The history of the evolution of a species or group, especially in reference to lines of descent and relationships among broad groups of organisms. |
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giselleislas07
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