Evolution, Genetics & Classification Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the domain of life whose cells keep their DNA inside a membrane-bound nucleus and contain other internal compartments such as energy organelles, a domain that takes in all animals, plants, fungi and the single-celled protists?

Question 2

What is the name for the separate arrival of similar solutions in unrelated lineages that face the same challenge, such as the wings of birds, bats and insects, the torpedo shape of sharks, dolphins and the extinct ichthyosaurs, or the camera eye of vertebrates and octopuses?

Question 3

What is the name for the situation in which neither version of a gene fully hides the other, so that an individual carrying one of each shows a blended, in-between form, as when a red-flowered and a white-flowered snapdragon are crossed and the offspring are pink?

Question 4

What is the name for the ladder of nested categories into which living things are sorted, running from domain down through kingdom, phylum, class, order, family and genus to species, each level wholly contained within the one above it?

Question 5

What is the name for the kind of selection driven by competition for mates rather than by survival, which produces the peacock's train, the stag's antlers, elaborate birdsong and bright breeding colours, even when these make their bearer slower or more conspicuous?

Question 6

What is the name for the technique that estimates how long ago two lineages last shared an ancestor by counting the differences that have built up between their DNA or protein sequences and dividing by the roughly steady rate at which such changes accumulate?

Question 7

What is the name for the branching diagram that sets out the proposed evolutionary relationships among a set of organisms, each fork standing for a common ancestor and the tips standing for the species or groups being compared?

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About Evolution, Genetics & Classification

This quiz is about how life changes and how we make sense of its variety: the idea of evolution and the people who built it, the fossil evidence, the rules of inheritance from Mendel's peas to the double helix and the genetic code, the machinery of classification from Linnaeus to the tree of life, the great chapters of deep time and human origins, and the modern techniques of cloning, gene editing and DNA identification. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing an idea, a pioneer, a law, a molecule, a process or a group and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz, not a picture quiz.

The first pack is evolution itself: natural selection and the men who found it, common descent, adaptation, leftover and shared and look-alike structures, sexual selection, the peppered moth, the fanning-out of island groups, chance changes in small populations, the founder and bottleneck effects, speciation, the fossil record and its in-between forms, the discarded Lamarckian idea, the stop-start tempo of change, and the molecular clock.

The second pack is classical genetics: Mendel, the gene and the allele, dominant and recessive, genotype and phenotype, the two laws and the Punnett square, blended and joint expression, the ABO blood groups, X-linked conditions, the X and Y switch, linkage and crossing over, Morgan's fruit flies, ordinary and reduction division, the chromosome miscount behind Down syndrome, and traits ruled by many genes at once.

The third pack is molecular genetics: DNA and the double helix, Rosalind Franklin, the base-pairing rule, the one-way flow of information, transcription and translation, the triplet codon, Har Gobind Khorana, the ribosome, replication, mutations large and small, the sickle-cell and malaria trade-off, mitochondrial DNA, the Human Genome Project, DNA fingerprinting, epigenetics and the model organisms.

The fourth pack is classification: Linnaeus and the two-word name, the ladder of ranks, the species and the type specimen, the three domains and the eukaryotes, cladistics and the clade, all-descendants versus leaves-some-out groups, the phylogenetic tree, the last universal common ancestor, the outgroup, DNA barcoding, ring species and subspecies, Haeckel and Mayr, the fungal kingdom and the phylum.

The fifth pack is deep time and its uses: the Cambrian explosion, the Big Five extinctions and the worst of them, the asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous, the 'living fossil', Lucy and the walking apes, Homo erectus, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, Out of Africa, selective breeding, genetically modified crops, Dolly the sheep, gene therapy, the fruit fly, heritability, kin selection, Batesian mimicry, the modern synthesis and J. B. S. Haldane.

The wrong answers are always other ideas, people or terms of the same kind. About a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph of fossils in rock, museum specimen drawers, pea flowers or a microscope, chosen because it names no answer and so cannot point to any option. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.