Name: Patrick Wrenn Take home Exam
Anthropology 104: Biological Anthropology
Answer all of the questions to the fullest.
1. What are the three types of speciation? Explain each.
Allopatric: A new species evolves due to a geographic barrier (squirrels of the Grand Canyon).
Parapatric: There is no specific extrinsic barrier to gene flow. Mating is more likely to happen between geographical neighbors than with organisms in different parts of the population’s range. A new niche in an existing population. (plants adapting to contaminated soil, resulting in a new flowering time).
Sympatric: When new species evolve from another species while still inhabiting the same geographic region. (Flies that begun mating on hawthorns now have a population that mate on apples).
2. What is the difference between polygenic inheritance and Pleiotropy?
Polygenic: Traits influenced by genes at two or more loci.
Pleiotropy: When a single gene influences more than one characteristic.
3. Assume in a hypothetical situation there is a certain island that contains 5 types of sea lizards, each occupying a section of the coast with no opportunity for mating amongst species on the other side of the island, but mating occurs with species that are adjacent. What is this an example of?
This is an example of a ring species.
4. Cladistics and evolutionary systematics are two approaches to classification. How are they similar and how are they different? What are the benefits of using one over another?
Cladistics: Focused on specifically chosen derived characters.
Benefits: More explicitly and rigorously defines the kinds of homologies that yield the most useful information.
Evolutionary Systematics: Using both ancestral and derived characters.
Benef...
... middle of paper ...
...hese children to human life.
Biological anthropology is broken into six branches, paleoanthropology, human osteology, human biology, anthropological genetics, forensic anthropology, and primatology. Primatology is the scientific study of primates, both living and extinct. Since we ourselves are primates it is natural that we should understand how they communicate and interact with their young. It could help us gain insight into why we act the way we do with our off spring. Our bones can tell us a lot about ourselves; even a simple measurement can be essential for identifying stature and growth patterns. These studies of osteology can help us better determine the health of the bone structure in infants. Something as simple and easy as measuring a forearm and help prevent a life threatening illness from causing a young one’s death before any symptoms become apparent.
Isle Royal is located fifty-six miles north of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. It is the largest wilderness area in Michigan (USNPS, 2014). The island is surrounded by Lake Superior, which creates a cooler temperature. This results in arctic plant species growth on the island. There are only eighteen mammal species present on the island because most mammals cannot make the trip across the frozen great lake (USNPS, 2014). The need for an ice bridge is not the only environmental factor that is stopping the migration of animals; there is also the severe cold, and also wind and fog (Vucetich, 2012). Some species such as caribou and coyote have found the island to be too intense and have gone extinct (Vucetich, 2012). Due to the harsh weather and isolation of the island, humans have never regularly lived on the island (Vucetich, 2012). Some of species that are present such as the red squirrel are becoming their own subspecies due to its separation from the mainland (USNPS, 2014). The isolation of Isle Royal is what makes it a great place to conduct research, it has very low human interaction and the species that are on the island will have been and continue to be isolated from the mainland.
Feder and Park present a list of traits that are used by paleoanthropologists to distinguish the appearance of skeletal features and characterize these changes over time. Th...
comes from and how they evolved in the manner that they did. This type of
Anthropology is a study of mankind that goes beyond the fragment of ones skeletal remains. Anthropology Studies involved within this science include the culture and surroundings a person once lived in.Anthropology, (2014) A example scientist often conduct archaeological digs. Their findings reveal many different aspects of that person or person’s life. The weather a person could have been exposed to. The environment or activities that person might have participated in. The scope of life that can be recovered from human remains is astonishing. Forensic Science as a whole is an impressive and interesting science that can be used within many different realms.
The truly unique thing about the Cambrian Explosion was the rapid generation of extremely diverse life forms. Life is generally classified with a system going from broad to specific description. Kingdom, the broadest classification, describes whether a given specimen is plant, animal, fungi, protist, or moneran. The next most specific indicator is phylum. The phyla indicate the body design of a taxonomical specimen. Humans, along with all other species that poses a spinal ...
The Galapagos Islands, located about 600 miles west of continental Ecuador, contain a rich history of settlement and exploration and represent a living example of evolution that is still relevant today. For centuries, this chain of volcanic islands has been used uniquely by various cultures based off distinct needs. What has remained the same however is the fact that island isolation has forced many animal and plant species to adapt differently from one another based off their island’s environmental conditions, creating a living model of microevolution over time. Today, these models tend to be the primary resources used by biology professors when teaching their students evolutionary topics.
...ship occurs, there is gene transfer between the organisms which is beneficial to the host cell as well as the symbiont.
They evolved into 2 different species by many factors in nature. The factors include genetic drift, mutation, natural selection, and etc. Genetic drift involves the bottleneck effect and the founder effect. I hypothesize that a bottleneck effect took place in the island that the rodents were living in. A natural disaster must of happened and the rodents that had high fitness survived. Therefore since one population survived, that makes them two separate species. I also hypothesize that there was a founder effect in the population of the rodents. A small portion of rodents migrated to Nevis island and reproduced. When this happened this created a whole new population of rodents. Another reason that they could have been 2 different species can be due to gene flow. Some rodents could of migrated to Nevis island.
Chapter two consists of Darwin continuing his studies. He talks about variation in the natural world compared to the domesticated species. He defines species variation and says that every naturalist has a different idea of the definition. He explains to the reader that linking other species together by characteristics of variation is challenging because some are so similar but vary in other ways. Environmental conditions could be effecting the variation. Climate, temperature, the separation of the animals could transform them. The species changes over time and have chi...
To do so, the anthropologist examines the overall sturdiness of the bones, as males tend to have larger bones and joint surface...
The results of natural selection in Darwin 's finches and British Columbian sparrows change my view of species because every living animal changes to survive conditions that get in the way of normal life.
...ous amount of information into many biological processes, our phylogenetic relationships and evolution (NHGRI, 2011).
Zacherl, Danielle. “Biology 171 Evolution and Biodiversity.” National Association of Research in Science Teaching 2007 Annual Meeting, New Orleans LA. (2007):n. page. Print.
On the second level, the introduced species starts to reproduce faster than other native species around it. It also out-competes native species for resources
...a much easier and more accurate approach to studying humans. By using quantifiable measures you can put a number on whatever you are studying rather than a vague guess, people want exact numbers and details. Anthropology is and will always be seen as a hard science.