Evolution, Genetics & Classification Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the rule that in DNA adenine always bonds with thymine and guanine always with cytosine, so that the sequence of one strand exactly dictates the other and the molecule can be copied without error?

Question 2

What is the name for body parts that share the same underlying arrangement of bones or tissues because they were inherited from a common ancestor, even though they now do very different jobs, as with the human arm, the bat wing, the whale flipper and the horse foreleg?

Question 3

What is the name for identifying a specimen to species by reading a short, standard stretch of its DNA, a particular mitochondrial gene in animals, and matching it against a reference library, a method used to expose mislabelled seafood, police the timber trade and survey the small life of a habitat?

Question 4

What is the name for the pattern shown by genes on the X chromosome, which affects males far more often because they carry only one X, so a single recessive version is enough: red-green colour blindness and haemophilia are the stock examples, the latter tracked through the royal houses descended from Queen Victoria?

Question 5

Which animal, born in Scotland in 1996, was the first mammal cloned from a fully specialised adult cell, made by transferring the nucleus of an udder cell into an egg emptied of its own, and proved that a mature cell's genome could be reset to grow a whole new individual?

Question 6

What is the name for an inherited feature that exists because, in a particular environment, it helped ancestors survive or reproduce, so that natural selection built and kept it: a cactus spine, a moth's ultrasound ear, the shape of a hummingbird's bill?

Question 7

What is the name for the evolutionary explanation for an animal helping its relatives at a cost to itself, on the grounds that relatives carry copies of many of the same genes, so aiding them can still spread the helper's own genes, summed up in Haldane's remark that he would die for two brothers or eight cousins?

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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.