Biology 質問

Scientists discovered that DNA sequences are conserved over generations. How did this discovery most benefit the study of organism classification?

What did early evolutionary biologists rely on to construct phylogenetic trees? Are they reliable?

What is one reason why simple resemblance is not reliable indicator of systematic relationships?

What characters do we currently use to construct phylogenetic trees?

What happened to the eukaryotes regarding multicellular organisms?

The Global Virome Project: how we may benefit from discovering, characterizing, and sequencing the genome of every virus on the planet that could infect humans

The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution and why convergence is unimportant in DNA-based trees (that an occasional convergent change at the nucleotide level owing to natural selection is numerically overwhelmed by the much larger number of unique, neutral substitutions).

Evidence for the bacterial origin of the mitochondrion and respiration in the eukaryotes

Quantification of heritability by artificial selection and by parent-offspring regression

Natural selection in boring times: stabilizing selection

Prediction of order of evolution within an ingroup, based on the phenotypes of contemporary organisms, the evolutionary tree, and the phenotypic state of the ingroup's most recent common ancestor.For example, we can predict the order of fossilizable traits from the phylogeny, and then find that that is the order that the traits occurred in the fossil record (jaws before digits, e.g.).

Evidence for homology and common ancestry across all of life, based on shared biochemical and genetic code features

How does the uniformity of genetic code across all organisms support a common ancestry? Is this the only excellent genetic code? Are there many equally good genetic codes? In what ways is this a great genetic code?

Applying the parsimony principle to determine that the phylogeny requires fewer evolutionary transitions (how many times whales and hoofed animals needed to be invented independently) if whales evolve from artiodactyls rather than the reverse

Most of our evolution is as bacteria, very little of our evolution is as humans. What is right and wrong about "when you were a tadpole and I was a fish in the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide, We sprawled through the ooze and slime?"

Evidence that the timing of the evolutionary invention of toothed whales was not based on the appearance of their most common food. Likewise, evidence that the timing of the evolutionary invention of baleen whales was not based on the appearance of krill, their most common food.

Homologous structures in different organisms can have identical, similar, or entirely different functions

Cascade of natural selection caused by evolution of a novel function: improvement of the novel function; taking advantage of new opportunities afforded by the novel function. In what ways could the beginnings of flight bring about new evolution of improved flight? In what ways could the beginnings of flight bring about the origin of new aerial functions?

How introgression allows a generally adaptive allele to spread from population to population, while allowing each population to maintain its adaptive differences

The Mendelian expectation of F2 frequencies in a single-locus cross, with complete dominance and no dominance