Spring 2004
1. When teaching evolution in Biology 1400, the most important goal that is always uppermost in Dr. Waggoner's mind is:

getting paid.

2. Which of these tissue types is not found in true plants?

connective

3. My new Ford Ranger XLT is unlike all known living organisms because it

is not made up of the elements C, H, O and N.

4. If my truck could reproduce and produce new trucks just like itself, this would be

heredity.

5. Aquarium fish sometimes get a skin disease called "ick", which causes white spots to appear all over the fish's body, causing damage to the skin, gills, and eyes. The disease is caused by a single-celled organism called Ichthyophthirus multifiliis. The relationship between the fish and Ichthyophthirus is best described as

none of the above. (The right answer would have "parasitism" if that had been an option.)

6. Ichthyophthirus multifiliis is a binomial (two-part) name in Latin. The custom of assigning official names to species in Latin was developed by

Carl Linnaeus.

7. The "multifiliis" part of the name of this species is the name of the ___ that it belongs to.

species

8. Ichthyophthirus is single-celled, and each cell contains a nucleus. We classify it in the Kingdom

Protista.

9. Someone who studied fish diseases might use "Koch's Postulates" to determine

whether Ichthyophthirus really causes "ick."

10. Ichthyophthirus attacks the skin of fish. Most of the damage that it does would be to the fish's __ tissue.

epithelial

11. The stinky mud at the bottom of a swamp has no oxygen in it, but many __ bacteria live there.

anaerobic

12. Which of the following is a scientific hypothesis?

Some people can use telepathy to communicate thoughts even when separated.

13. George Cuvier came up with what was then a shocking idea in the early 1800s-he documented conclusively that

some animal species had become extinct in the long past.

14. A tree gets thicker as it gets older because it has a tissue called

cambium.

15. Which of these gives an example of a vestigial structure?

Some snakes have tiny pelvic bones about halfway down the body.

16. If you poisoned a plant with an herbicide that attacked its apical meristem, the plant would

stop growing taller.

17. I once got into a pointless argument with one of those evangelists who come to campus every so often and yell at everyone. The evangelist-the blond guy with the squinty expression, remember?-claimed that no fossils had ever been found that could form a "line of descent" from monkeys to people. This didn't actually bother me, because

A and B are correct.

A: evolution forms complex branching "trees", not nice straight lines.
B: even without fossils, there are other lines of evidence to test evolutionary hypotheses.

18. Wild cabbage is a low, scrubby, bitter-tasting plant-but it's given rise to broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and cultivated cabbage. This probably resulted from years of

artificial selection.

19. If I asked you to draw me a picture of Streptococcus bacteria, you might draw something like this:

[answer: a chian of round cells.
Right? "Coccus" means the cells are round, and "strepto" = "chains"

20. Which of the following statements is not true about all plants?

They all have vascular tissue that conducts water and nutrients.

21. People with a genetic disease called Marfan's syndrome manufacture a defective version of _____, the main component of the extracellular matrix.

collagen.

22. Mushrooms and puffballs are examples of

sporocarps.

23. Suppose that you were driving on the Interstate after an ice-storm. Suppose you accelerate to 40 mph, immediately lose control, and run off the road. Now suppose that you do this several times, and finally conclude that it's a general rule that driving faster than a certain speed causes you to skid. This is an example of

induction.

24. The Galápagos Islands were the place where _____ made important observations.

Darwin

25. If you miss an assignment or test, what must you bring to class in order not to get an automatic zero grade?

Some kind of official written documentation of your absence.

In 1990, a dentist in Florida, who was HIV-infected, was taken to court when seven of his patients also tested positive for HIV. The dentist was charged with failing to take safety precautions to keep the HIV from spreading to his patients.

Scientists compared the genetic material from the HIV in the dentist with genetic material from the HIV in the seven patients. As a control, they also studied genetic material from the HIV in infected people who had never had any contact with the dentist. These comparisons enabled them to draw up this diagram:

[insert cladogram diagram here]

NOTE: The dentist had more than one type of HIV, which is why he appears twice.

26. This diagram is a (an)

cladogram.

27. This diagram could be described as

a hypothesis of how these HIV strains all share common ancestors.

28. Which of these pairs of people have HIV that shares the most recent common ancestor?

The dentist and Patient C.

29. Based on the diagram above, which of the dentist's patients are most likely to have caught HIV from the dentist?

Patients A, B, C, E, and G.

30. I read just this morning on CNN's Web site about some strange spherical rocks, about the size of BBs, that have been found on Mars by the rovers (shown above, magnified). The article reads: "the spheres could have been formed in a volcano or a meteor impact, or they might be the result of running water. Those are the three ___ researchers have been working with for several days now. Each is still a possibility."

hypotheses

31. Accidentally omitted.

32. Suppose we find that the spherical rocks (spherules) are identical to rocks formed on Earth in volcanoes. If we then conclude that the Mars rocks are volcanic in origin, this would be a use of

Lyell's principle of uniformitarianism.

33. The Mars rovers aren't equipped to do a formal, rigorous experiment on how those spherules got there. This means that

scientists will have to rely on careful observations.

34. It's possible that life something like Earth bacteria could survive on Mars, but if they exist there they'd probably need a firm, stiff, protective coating on the outside-a

cell wall.

35. Darwin's theory of natural selection would fail if:

all of the above.

I.e, it would fail if: members of a species didn't vary; populations never grew large; organisms couldn't pass on their traits to their offspring; and a living thing's traits made no difference to its chances of surviving and reproducing.

36. Which of these lines of evidence did Darwin not use to support the idea that evolution had occurred?

evidence from DNA

37. What usually has to happen for new species to evolve from a common ancestor?

The ancestral population must be divided by a barrier.

38. I used to engage in public debates with creationists. One of their favorite tactics is to claim that the teaching of evolution in modern times directly causes modern problems such as violence, child abuse, pornography, drug abuse, etc. (I'm not kidding. I've been directly blamed-in public-for the Columbine high school shootings by one very enthusiastic evangelist.) But even if it's true that the teaching of evolution and the rise in crime and violence happened at the same time, the evangelists are still making a logical mistake called

the post hoc fallacy.

A.k.a. post hoc ergo propter hoc-"after it, therefore because of it"-or the fallacy of assuming that correlation equals causality. Just because two things happen together doesn't mena that one caused the other.

39. If I asked you to go outside and bring me back something with lots of chitin in it, you might look for

a mushroom.

40. Today, in places such as Alaska, glaciers ("rivers" of ice) are dumping finely pulverized rock together with large pebbles and boulders into the ocean. In summer of 2002, I visited southern Australia and saw a layer of rock called the Elatina Formation that's made up of pebbles, boulders, and finely pulverized rock particles. The principle that Charles Lyell came up with would allow me to say that the Elatina Formation probably formed as a result of glacial activity.

41. What phylum do we ourselves belong to within the Animalia?

Chordata.

42. Your heart is considered to be an organ because it is made up of several types of

tissue.

43. When my father was a teenager, he worked in the drugstore in a small town in Iowa. He remembers that they used to sell a medicine called "Kickapoo Oil." If a sick person took some Kickapoo Oil and then felt better, this could be an example of

the placebo effect.

44. Biologists who study snakes generally agree that snakes evolved from a type of lizard. Which line of evidence does not support this hypothesis?

Snakes are secondary and tertiary consumers in many ecosystems.

45. The ship that Darwin sailed around the world in from 1831 to 1836 was named the

Beagle.

46. Which of these is not one of the most common chemical elements found in all living things?

silicon

47. A few scientists still do not believe that the HIV virus causes the disease AIDS. Part of the reason for their skepticism is that HIV cannot be grown independently, outside the body of an infected person. This means that

HIV cannot be studied using Koch's Postulates.

48. Many fungi and bacteria are saprotrophic, which means that you might find them

living on dead and decaying animals and plants.

49. Male birds sing to attract females and warn off other males. (The British writer Terry Pratchett once joked that if you could understand what a singing bird was actually saying, it would be something like "Have sex with me, I can make my chest big and red!") What could this behavior cause?

sexual selection

50. UCA is in the town of

Conway.