169 Fun Facts About Evolution

In biology, evolution is defined as the change in what over successive generations?

Heritable characteristics of populations shift when evolutionary processes act on genetic variation within a population.

Which two British naturalists independently conceived the theory of evolution by natural selection?

Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace: their papers were read together at the Linnean Society of London on 1 July 1858, after Wallace mailed Darwin an essay that matched his own unpublished theory.

In which book did Darwin first set out the theory in detail?

On the Origin of Species, published in November 1859, was Darwin's first full account of natural selection; the anonymous 1844 Vestiges had already primed the public for evolution.

What is the ultimate source of all genetic variation in organisms?

Mutation, a change in DNA sequence, is the only process that creates new alleles; gene flow, drift and selection only redistribute existing variation. Most protein-altering mutations are harmful or neutral, a few beneficial.

What is the random fluctuation of allele frequencies from one generation to the next called?

Genetic drift is the random change in allele frequencies between generations caused by chance sampling; it acts fastest in small populations and can fix or eliminate alleles without selection.

According to the neutral theory of molecular evolution, most evolutionary change results from what?

Random drift fixing harmless mutations: the neutral theory of 1968 holds that most changes at the molecular level are selectively neutral and spread by genetic drift rather than by selection.

How is an organism's evolutionary fitness measured?

Fitness is an organism's ability to survive and reproduce, measured as its genetic contribution to the next generation; an animal whose offspring all die before breeding contributes little.

What is a 'throwback' trait like hind legs in dolphins, from reactivated dormant genes, called?

An atavism is the reappearance of an ancestral trait lost in evolution, such as hind-limb buds on dolphins or the regained wings reported in some stick insects.

Which term describes natural selection that favours both extremes of a trait over the average?

Disruptive selection favours both extremes over the intermediate, as in African seedcracker finches where large- and small-billed birds outcompete mid-sized ones; directional selection shifts the mean, stabilising selection narrows it.

Cumbersome antlers, mating calls and bright male colours are products of which evolutionary process?

Sexual selection, Darwin's term for competition over mates, produces costly ornaments like antlers and bright plumage because they raise mating success even at a cost to survival.

In a famous long-term laboratory experiment, E. coli evolved the ability to use what as a nutrient?

A Flavobacterium separately evolved an enzyme to eat nylon by-products, and Sphingobium learned to degrade a synthetic pesticide.

The bones in a bat's wing closely match those in a mouse's foot and a human hand because of what?

Descent from a common mammalian ancestor: bat wing, mouse foot and human hand are homologous pentadactyl limbs built from the same bones, inherited from a shared ancestor and modified for different uses.

Which of these is listed as a vestigial structure in humans?

The coccyx, or tailbone, is the vestigial remnant of the ancestral mammalian tail, fused from three to five vertebrae; the appendix, goose bumps and wisdom teeth are other human vestiges.

What is the term for a structure that evolved for one function but became useful for another?

An exaptation is a trait co-opted for a new role: the flattened head of the lizard Holaspis guentheri evolved for hiding in crevices and now also aids gliding between trees.

Bones that form the jaw in other animals develop into which structure in mammals?

Part of the middle ear: the reptilian articular and quadrate jaw bones became the mammalian malleus and incus, a transition traced in cynodont fossils and in embryonic development.

A genetic change in chickens can cause embryos to grow what, resembling those of crocodiles?

Teeth: chicken embryos with the talpid2 mutation grow conical, crocodile-like teeth, reported by Harris and colleagues in 2006, showing that developmental genes for structures lost in bird evolution can be reactivated.

Which evolutionary biologist defined the Biological Species Concept in 1942?

Ernst Mayr set out the Biological Species Concept in his 1942 book Systematics and the Origin of Species: species are groups of interbreeding natural populations reproductively isolated from other such groups.

What is the most common way new animal species form, in geographically isolated populations?

Allopatric speciation, the commonest mode in animals, begins when a barrier such as a river or mountain range splits a population; selection and drift then act separately until the groups can no longer interbreed.

What term describes speciation in a small isolated population, driven by the founder effect?

Peripatric speciation, Ernst Mayr's term, occurs when a small group colonises an isolated area such as an island; the founder effect and drift in the tiny population drive rapid divergence.

The grass Anthoxanthum odoratum undergoes parapatric speciation in response to what?

Metal pollution from mines: sweet vernal grass on old mine spoil evolved heavy-metal tolerance and a shifted flowering time, reducing interbreeding with neighbouring non-tolerant plants, a textbook case of incipient parapatric speciation.

Arabidopsis suecica arose about 20,000 years ago through what process, common in plants but rare in animals?

Polyploidy lets the chromosomes of two parent species pair up properly at meiosis; the event has been repeated in the lab.

Which theory explains the fossil pattern of short bursts of evolution between long periods of stasis?

Punctuated equilibrium, proposed in 1972, holds that species stay stable for long spans and change rapidly at speciation in small isolated populations that rarely fossilise; it contrasts with phyletic gradualism.

Which mass extinction event was the largest in Earth's history, killing most marine species?

The Permian–Triassic extinction, about 252 million years ago, was the largest known; classic estimates put marine species losses near 96 percent, with Siberian Traps volcanism the leading suspected cause.

Roughly what proportion of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct?

More than 99%: over five billion species are estimated to have lived on Earth, and the roughly 1.2 to 1.9 million living species so far described are a tiny fraction of that total.

What does the acronym LUCA stand for?

Last universal common ancestor: LUCA is the most recent organism from which all living things descend, dated to roughly 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago or earlier; a 2016 study attributed 355 gene families to it.

How old is the Earth?

About 4.54 billion years: the Earth's age comes from radiometric dating of meteorites and the oldest minerals, with an uncertainty of about 50 million years; the universe itself is 13.8 billion years old.

Where were microbial mat fossils found in 3.48-billion-year-old sandstone?

Western Australia: microbially induced sedimentary structures were reported in 2013 from 3.48-billion-year-old sandstone of the Dresser Formation in the Pilbara region; older biogenic graphite from Greenland is 3.7 billion years old.

What percentage of their genomes do humans and chimpanzees share, according to DNA comparisons?

The few areas of difference help date their common ancestor via the molecular clock.

Roughly when did eukaryotic cells emerge?

1.6 to 2.7 billion years ago: the oldest eukaryote-like fossils date to about 1.6 to 1.8 billion years, and later engulfment of bacteria produced mitochondria and, from cyanobacteria-like cells, chloroplasts.

The Cambrian explosion, in which most modern animal types appeared, began roughly how long ago?

539 million years: the Cambrian explosion began at the start of the Cambrian period, about 538.8 million years ago, and over roughly 20 million years most modern animal phyla appeared in the fossil record.

Which group of animals makes up the majority of animal species today?

Insects make up the majority of animal species, with roughly a million described species out of about 1.5 million named animals; beetles alone account for around 400,000.

Roughly when did anatomically modern humans first appear?

Around 250,000 years ago: Homo sapiens emerged in Africa roughly 300,000 to 250,000 years ago, the oldest fossils being from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco; the Homininae go back about 10 million years.

Which pre-Socratic philosophers first suggested one organism could descend from another?

Anaximander and Empedocles: Anaximander held that the first animals arose in water and humans developed from fish-like creatures, and Empedocles imagined organisms assembled from parts; Lucretius later carried such ideas into De rerum natura.

Which Arab scholar wrote in his 1377 Muqaddimah that humans developed from 'the world of the monkeys'?

Ibn Khaldun, the Tunisian-born historian, wrote in the Muqaddimah of 1377 that humans developed from 'the world of the monkeys' in a process by which 'species become more numerous'.

Whose 1809 'transmutation' theory was the first full-fledged evolutionary scheme?

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique of 1809 proposed the first fully formed theory of evolution: lineages inherit changes caused by use and disuse and are driven by an inherent tendency toward complexity.

Whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population influenced Darwin's idea of a 'struggle for existence'?

Thomas Robert Malthus argued in his 1798 Essay that populations outgrow their food supply; Darwin read it in 1838 and drew from it the 'struggle for existence' that drives natural selection.

Which American palaeontologist showed Thomas Huxley a fossil horse series in 1876, classic evidence for evolution?

Othniel C. Marsh of Yale assembled the fossil horse sequence Thomas Huxley used in his 1876 New York lectures; Darwin called Marsh's work the best support for evolution in twenty years.

What did Darwin call his provisional, and ultimately wrong, theory of heredity?

Pangenesis, Darwin's 1868 hypothesis, held that every cell sheds 'gemmules' that gather in the reproductive organs; Mendel's laws, rediscovered in 1900, displaced it.

Which scientist distinguished germ cells from somatic cells, showing heredity passes only via the germ line?

August Weismann's germ plasm theory of the 1880s separated the germ cells that transmit heredity from the somatic cells of the body, ruling out inheritance of acquired characteristics.

In which decades did the 'modern synthesis' fuse natural selection with Mendelian population genetics?

The 1920s and 1930s: mathematical population genetics, culminating in the 1930 Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, reframed evolution as change in allele frequencies and folded in drift and gene flow.

Who wrote in 1973 that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution'?

Theodosius Dobzhansky, the Ukrainian-American geneticist, used the phrase as the title of a 1973 essay in The American Biology Teacher; he also supplied standard definitions of adaptation and adaptedness.

Which genes, first studied in fruit flies, lay out the head-to-tail body plan?

Hox genes, discovered through fruit-fly mutants with legs growing from the head, control where body segments form from head to tail and are shared across animals, a central subject of evo-devo.

What is the 1925 case that kept evolution out of American textbooks for a generation called?

The Scopes trial of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, convicted teacher John Scopes of teaching evolution; publishers then dropped the subject from textbooks, and teaching it was only protected by Epperson v. Arkansas in 1968.

Which 2005 court case excluded 'intelligent design' from American science classrooms?

Kitzmiller v. Dover, decided in December 2005 by Judge John E. Jones III in Pennsylvania, ruled that intelligent design is not science and cannot be taught in public-school biology classes.

Breeding together different cave populations of which blind fish produced offspring with working eyes?

The Mexican tetra, Astyanax mexicanus: Richard Borowsky's 2008 crosses between different blind cave populations produced sighted offspring, because different mutations had knocked out sight in each cave and complemented each other.

Whose 1960s 'evolution strategies' made artificial evolution a recognised optimisation method?

Ingo Rechenberg, a Berlin engineer, developed evolution strategies in the 1960s and early 1970s to optimise engineering designs; genetic algorithms were later popularised by John Henry Holland's 1975 book.

The four genes the human eye uses to sense light all descend from what?

A single ancestral gene was duplicated: one copy keeps the old job while the other is free to change, which is how three colour-vision genes and one night-vision gene arose.

What is the intentional breeding of domesticated plants and animals for chosen traits called?

Artificial selection has shaped crops and livestock for thousands of years; directed evolution applies the same principle to proteins in the lab.

What did Darwin suggest in an 1837 notebook the 'tree of life' should perhaps be called?

The coral of life: in his 1837 Notebook B, Darwin wrote that the tree of life 'should perhaps be called the coral of life', since a coral's lower branches are dead, like extinct lineages.

Which two processes are the sources of new species and the loss of species, respectively?

Speciation and extinction bookend a species; change within a single species over time is called anagenesis.

In which century did naturalist John Ray first apply 'species' strictly to plants and animals?

The 17th: John Ray's Historia Plantarum of 1686 gave the first biological definition of species; Linnaeus's 1735 Systema Naturae then laid out a hierarchical classification.

Where is Charles Darwin buried?

Westminster Abbey: Darwin died on 19 April 1882 and was buried on 26 April in the Abbey's nave, close to the grave of Isaac Newton.

At which university did the young Darwin neglect his medical studies to investigate marine invertebrates?

At Edinburgh he helped Robert Edmond Grant investigate marine invertebrates instead, then studied at Christ's College, Cambridge from 1828 to 1831.

How many years did Darwin's voyage aboard HMS Beagle last?

Five: the Beagle left Plymouth on 27 December 1831 and returned to Falmouth on 2 October 1836, nearly five years, though Darwin had been told it would take two.

How many copies were in the first printing of On the Origin of Species?

1,250: John Murray printed 1,250 copies of the first edition, and the whole stock was oversubscribed when offered to booksellers on 22 November 1859, priced at 15 shillings.

Whom did Charles Darwin marry in January 1839?

Emma Wedgwood, Darwin's first cousin, married him on 29 January 1839 at St Peter's church in Maer, in an Anglican ceremony arranged to suit the Wedgwoods' Unitarian leanings.

HMS Beagle was one of more than 100 10-gun brig-sloops of which type?

Cherokee class: HMS Beagle was a Cherokee-class 10-gun brig-sloop launched at Woolwich Dockyard on 11 May 1820, costing £7,803; the class was nicknamed 'coffin brigs' for its poor handling.

How much of the Beagle voyage did Darwin spend on land rather than at sea?

Three years and three months: of the Beagle's nearly five-year voyage, Darwin spent about 39 months ashore exploring and only about 18 months at sea, where he suffered badly from seasickness.

Which book, read during the Beagle voyage, greatly influenced Darwin's geological thinking?

Lyell's Principles of Geology: FitzRoy gave Darwin the first volume before sailing, and its uniformitarian view of slow geological change shaped how Darwin interpreted landforms and fossils on the voyage.

At which Argentine site did Darwin find gigantic fossils of extinct mammals?

Punta Alta, near Bahía Blanca, is where in September 1832 Darwin dug out bones of giant extinct mammals, including a Megatherium jaw and glyptodont armour, fossils then known from very few specimens.

Which naturalist gives his name to the faunal boundary dividing Asian and Australasian animals in Indonesia?

Alfred Russel Wallace: the Wallace Line, which he described in 1859 from his travels in the Malay Archipelago, runs between Bali and Lombok and between Borneo and Sulawesi, separating Asian from Australasian fauna.

Wallace is sometimes called the father of which scientific discipline?

Biogeography: Wallace's 1876 work The Geographical Distribution of Animals made him the 19th century's leading authority on where species occur, earning him the title 'father of biogeography'.

In which river basin did Wallace begin his extensive fieldwork?

The Amazon: Wallace spent 1848 to 1852 collecting along the Amazon and Rio Negro, losing most of his specimens when his ship burned on the return voyage.

How many characteristics of pea plants did Gregor Mendel study?

Seven: Mendel tracked seven traits in pea plants — plant height, pod shape, pod colour, seed shape, seed colour, flower position and flower colour — in experiments on some 28,000 plants over eight years.

In Mendel's pea crosses, green seeds reappeared in the second generation at what ratio to yellow?

1 to 3: crossing yellow-seeded with green-seeded peas gave all-yellow first-generation plants, and in the second generation about one green for every three yellow, the pattern Mendel explained with dominant and recessive factors.

Gregor Mendel served as abbot of which religious house in Brno?

St. Thomas' Abbey: Mendel entered the Augustinian abbey in Brno in 1843, ran his pea experiments in its garden through the late 1850s and early 1860s, and was elected abbot in 1868.

Which biologist was nicknamed 'Darwin's Bulldog'?

Thomas Henry Huxley, a comparative anatomist, earned the nickname 'Darwin's Bulldog' for his combative public defence of natural selection, which the reclusive Darwin left to others.

Which term for the position that ultimate truths are unknowable did Huxley coin in 1869?

Agnosticism: Huxley coined the word in 1869 at the Metaphysical Society, from the Greek for 'unknowable', to describe his view that claims beyond evidence cannot be known; he elaborated it in essays in 1889.

Which bishop supposedly asked Huxley whether he descended from a monkey via his grandfather or grandmother?

Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, reportedly put the question to Huxley at the British Association meeting in the Oxford University Museum on 30 June 1860; Huxley replied he would rather have an ape for a grandfather.

Who wrote the anonymous 1844 evolutionary bestseller Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation?

Robert Chambers, the Edinburgh publisher, wrote Vestiges anonymously in 1844; it argued for the progressive development of species, sold widely, and was only confirmed as his in 1884, after his death.

Which anatomist coached Bishop Wilberforce before the Oxford debate?

Owen and Huxley also feuded over whether humans were closely related to apes.

To which bird family do Darwin's finches actually belong?

Tanagers: despite the name, Darwin's finches are placed in the tanager family Thraupidae, not among true finches; their closest living relative is the dull-coloured grassquit of South America.

Who popularised the term 'Darwin's finches' in a 1947 book?

David Lack's 1947 book Darwin's Finches popularised the name, which Percy Lowe had first used in 1936; Lack's study of the birds' beaks helped cement them as an example of adaptive radiation.

Which of Darwin's finches lives outside the Galápagos, on an island belonging to Costa Rica?

The Cocos finch, Pinaroloxias inornata, lives only on Cocos Island, a Costa Rican possession about 550 km offshore; the other seventeen or so species are confined to the Galápagos.

The rise of dark peppered moths in 19th-century England is an example of what phenomenon?

Industrial melanism: soot-darkened bark favoured the black carbonaria form of Biston betularia, which spread across industrial England after 1848; Sewall Wright called it the clearest observed case of a conspicuous evolutionary process.

Which British lepidopterist's 1950s release experiments tied peppered moth colour to bird predation?

Bernard Kettlewell released marked light and dark peppered moths in polluted woodland near Birmingham in 1953 and unpolluted Dorset woodland in 1955, showing birds took the more conspicuous form more often.

Where in Nunavut were the first Tiktaalik fossils found in 2004?

Ellesmere Island: Neil Shubin, Ted Daeschler and Farish Jenkins found Tiktaalik roseae in 2004 on southern Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, a lobe-finned fish with a flat head, neck and limb-like fins.

From which geological period does Tiktaalik date?

Late Devonian: Tiktaalik lived about 375 million years ago, in the Late Devonian, and its fins had sturdy interior bones that let it prop itself up in shallow water.

All Archaeopteryx fossils come from limestone quarried near which German town?

Solnhofen: every Archaeopteryx specimen comes from the fine-grained Solnhofen limestone of Bavaria, laid down in a Late Jurassic lagoon about 150 million years ago; the first skeleton was found in 1861.

What does the name Archaeopteryx mean?

Ancient wing: the name combines Greek archaios, 'ancient', and pteryx, 'wing' or 'feather'; Germans call it the Urvogel, 'original bird'.

Who discovered the Australopithecus skeleton 'Lucy' in Ethiopia in 1974?

Donald Johanson, with graduate student Tom Gray, found Lucy at Hadar in Ethiopia's Afar region on 24 November 1974; she was named after 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds', played repeatedly in camp that night.

Roughly what fraction of Lucy's skeleton was recovered?

40%: several hundred bone fragments made up about 40 percent of Lucy's skeleton, an Australopithecus afarensis who lived about 3.2 million years ago and walked upright despite an ape-sized brain.

What does Lucy's Amharic name Dinkinesh mean?

You are marvellous: Lucy's Amharic name, Dinkinesh, means 'you are marvellous'; her small brain and upright gait showed that bipedalism preceded big brains in human evolution.

Which archaic human was the first to leave Africa and wield fire?

Homo erectus, which appeared about two million years ago, was the first human species known to spread beyond Africa, reaching Georgia and East Asia, and is associated with the earliest controlled use of fire.

Under what genus and species name did Eugène Dubois publish Java Man in 1894?

Pithecanthropus erectus: Dubois's 1894 monograph named the Trinil skullcap, molar and femur Pithecanthropus erectus, 'upright ape-man'; the species was later folded into Homo erectus.

Dubois's team found Java Man at Trinil on the banks of which waterway?

The Solo: Trinil lies on the Bengawan Solo, Java's longest river, where Dubois's convict labourers dug a molar, skullcap and thighbone from the bank deposits between 1891 and 1892.

In what year was the first recognised Neanderthal fossil found in Germany's Neander Valley?

1856: quarry workers in the Feldhofer grotto of the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf uncovered a skullcap and limb bones in August 1856, the first fossil recognised as a distinct form of human.

Sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in which year revealed interbreeding with modern humans?

2010: the draft Neanderthal genome, published in Science in May 2010 by a team at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, showed that non-African modern humans carry about one to four percent Neanderthal DNA.

The first Denisovan was identified in 2010 from DNA in what remains from a Siberian cave?

A juvenile finger bone: mitochondrial DNA from a girl's fingertip bone found in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains, published in March 2010, revealed a previously unknown human lineage.

Which Chinese skull, named Homo longi, was shown to represent a Denisovan?

The Harbin cranium, found in 1933 in northeast China and named Homo longi in 2021, was linked to Denisovans in 2025 by proteins from its bone and mitochondrial DNA from its dental calculus.

Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the 'Hobbit', was discovered in 2003 in which cave?

Liang Bua, a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, yielded the first Homo floresiensis skeleton in September 2003; the individual stood about 1.1 metres tall.

What is generally accepted as the cause of Homo floresiensis's small body size?

Insular dwarfism: large animals isolated on islands often evolve smaller bodies, as with Flores's dwarf Stegodon elephants; Homo floresiensis, about 1.1 metres tall, is thought to be a human example.

Homo naledi was discovered in 2013 in which South African cave system?

Rising Star: cavers found the bones in the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star cave system near Johannesburg in 2013, and Lee Berger's team recovered more than 1,550 specimens from at least 15 individuals.

Which living animals are the closest relatives of whales and dolphins?

Hippopotamuses: molecular studies place whales and dolphins closest to hippos among living animals, the two lineages having diverged roughly 55 million years ago from even-toed ungulate ancestors.

In which modern country did the land-to-water transition of cetaceans mostly take place?

Pakistan: fossils of Pakicetus, Ambulocetus and Rodhocetus from Eocene rocks in Pakistan's Punjab and Balochistan provinces, first found in the late 1970s, document the stages from land mammal to swimmer.

What is the cladistic term for similar traits arising by convergent evolution?

Homoplasy: in cladistics a homoplasy is a similarity not inherited from a common ancestor, like the wings of birds, bats and pterosaurs, which are analogous although the forelimbs beneath them are homologous.

Which bacteria are mitochondria thought to be related to?

Rickettsiales: mitochondrial genomes group with the Rickettsiales, an order of alphaproteobacteria that includes the intracellular parasite Rickettsia; chloroplasts, by contrast, descend from cyanobacteria.

Which Russian botanist articulated the endosymbiotic theory in 1905 and 1910?

Konstantin Mereschkowski proposed in 1905 that chloroplasts originated as symbiotic cyanobacteria and broadened the idea in 1910, building on Andreas Schimper's 1883 observation that chloroplasts divide like bacteria.

Roughly how many journals rejected Lynn Margulis's 1967 paper on the origin of eukaryotic cells?

About fifteen: Margulis's paper 'On the Origin of Mitosing Cells' was turned down by around fifteen journals before the Journal of Theoretical Biology published it in 1967; the endosymbiosis idea was then largely ignored for a decade.

With which British chemist did Lynn Margulis co-develop the Gaia hypothesis?

James Lovelock, the British chemist and inventor of the electron capture detector, proposed Gaia in the early 1970s and developed it with Margulis from 1974; it casts Earth as a self-regulating system.

Under Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium with alleles A and a at frequencies p and q, what is the frequency of heterozygotes?

2pq: under Hardy-Weinberg the genotype frequencies are p² for AA, 2pq for Aa and q² for aa, which holds only without drift, selection, mutation, migration or non-random mating.

Who proposed the Red Queen hypothesis in 1973?

Leigh Van Valen proposed the Red Queen hypothesis in a 1973 paper, 'A New Evolutionary Law', to explain why lineages face a roughly constant probability of extinction: species must keep evolving just to keep pace with rivals and parasites.

Which habit of social insects struck Darwin as a 'special difficulty' for natural selection?

Honey bees leaving breeding to their mothers: sterile workers seemed 'fatal to my whole theory', Darwin wrote in the Origin, but he argued selection could favour the family 'stock', an early hint of kin selection.

Which term for a unit of cultural evolution did The Selfish Gene introduce in 1976?

Meme: Dawkins coined the word in the final chapter of The Selfish Gene, shortening the Greek mimeme, 'something imitated', to name a unit of cultural transmission analogous to the gene.

With whom did Stephen Jay Gould develop the theory of punctuated equilibrium in 1972?

Niles Eldredge, a palaeontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, co-wrote the 1972 paper with Gould that proposed punctuated equilibrium, contrasting it with phyletic gradualism.

With whom did E. O. Wilson develop his 1967 theory about species numbers on islands?

Robert MacArthur, a Princeton ecologist, co-wrote The Theory of Island Biogeography with Wilson in 1967, modelling species numbers on islands as a balance between immigration and extinction.

Which Japanese biologist introduced the neutral theory of molecular evolution in 1968?

Motoo Kimura published the neutral theory in Nature in 1968, arguing most molecular change is due to drift of neutral mutations; he was known for using diffusion equations to compute allele fixation probabilities.

Which three scientists are considered the 'great trio' of the modern synthesis in population genetics?

Fisher, Haldane and Wright: Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane and Sewall Wright built the mathematical population genetics of the 1920s and 1930s that underpins the modern synthesis; Dawkins called Fisher the greatest of Darwin's successors.

Which idea about life's origin did J. B. S. Haldane's 1929 article on abiogenesis introduce?

The primordial soup: Haldane's 1929 essay proposed that ultraviolet light acting on a prebiotic ocean produced a 'hot dilute soup' of organic compounds, an idea Alexander Oparin had independently reached in 1924.

Which measure did Sewall Wright discover along with methods to compute it in pedigree animals?

The inbreeding coefficient: Wright defined F in 1921-22 as the probability that two alleles at a locus are identical by descent, with path-coefficient methods to compute it from pedigrees of livestock.

Batesian mimicry is named after a naturalist who studied butterflies in which country's rainforests?

Brazil: Henry Walter Bates spent eleven years from 1848 in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil, where he described harmless butterflies imitating distasteful ones, the pattern named Batesian mimicry in his honour.

In Müllerian mimicry, what kinds of organisms converge in appearance?

Two or more well-defended ones: in Müllerian mimicry, proposed by Fritz Müller in 1878, several unpalatable species share a warning pattern so predators learn it faster, one of biology's first frequency-dependent selection models.

To which country do the Galápagos Islands belong?

Ecuador: the Galápagos lie about 900 km west of mainland Ecuador, which annexed them in 1832; they form Ecuador's Galápagos Province, with just over 33,000 people in 2020.

Which bishop accidentally discovered the Galápagos Islands in 1535?

Tomás de Berlanga, Bishop of Panama, drifted onto the Galápagos in March 1535 when currents carried his ship off course on a voyage to Peru; no earlier visit is documented.

Beagle captain Robert FitzRoy later coined which everyday weather term?

Forecast: FitzRoy coined the term 'weather forecast' after founding in 1854 the Meteorological Office, which issued the first public storm warnings and daily forecasts in The Times from 1861.

Robert FitzRoy served as the second governor of which colony from 1843 to 1845?

New Zealand: FitzRoy became the colony's second governor in December 1843, after William Hobson, and was recalled in 1845 after trying to shield Maori and settlers from speculative land deals while short of troops and money.

Which Birmingham discussion group of industrialists counted Charles Darwin's grandfather as a founder?

The Lunar Society of Birmingham, whose members included Boulton, Watt, Priestley and Wedgwood, met monthly near the full moon; Darwin's grandfather, a physician, was among its founders in the 1760s.

Which naturalist established extinction as a scientific fact and is called the founding father of paleontology?

Georges Cuvier showed in 1796 that mammoth bones differed from living elephants, establishing extinction as a fact; he held that periodic catastrophes had wiped out such species, and is called the founding father of palaeontology.

Which philosopher dubbed Lyell's gradualist view 'uniformitarianism'?

William Whewell coined both 'uniformitarianism' and 'catastrophism' in an 1832 review of the second volume of Lyell's Principles of Geology, contrasting Lyell's gradual change with Cuvier's catastrophes.

Which Scottish scientist is known as the 'Father of Modern Geology'?

James Hutton, an Edinburgh geologist, argued in his 1788 Theory of the Earth for an immensely old, slowly changing planet, using the unconformity at Siccar Point and Salisbury Crags as evidence.

Which gases, plus water, did the 1952 Miller-Urey experiment use to simulate early Earth?

Methane, ammonia and hydrogen: Miller sealed those gases with water vapour in a closed apparatus and passed electric sparks through it to simulate lightning, producing amino acids within a week.

Which molecule do many scientists propose preceded both DNA and proteins in early life?

RNA: the RNA world hypothesis, named by Walter Gilbert in 1986, proposes that self-replicating RNA came before DNA and proteins, since RNA can both carry genetic information and act as a catalyst, as ribozymes do.

Roughly when did the Great Oxidation Event begin?

About 2.4 billion years ago: oxygen from cyanobacterial photosynthesis began accumulating in the atmosphere around 2.4 billion years ago, the Great Oxidation Event, eventually reaching perhaps a tenth of modern levels.

What is the proposed radiation of Ediacaran life 575 million years ago called?

The Avalon explosion, named after Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula, is the proposed rapid diversification of the Ediacaran biota about 575 million years ago, soon after the Gaskiers glaciation.

Which metal is unusually abundant in the K-Pg boundary clay, pointing to an asteroid?

Iridium: in 1980 Luis and Walter Alvarez reported iridium, rare in Earth's crust but common in asteroids, at dozens of times normal levels in the boundary clay at Gubbio, Italy.

What fraction of plant and animal species died in the K-Pg extinction event?

About three-quarters: the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction 66 million years ago wiped out roughly 75 percent of plant and animal species, including every non-avian dinosaur and nearly every tetrapod over 25 kg except ectotherms like crocodilians.

How wide is the Chicxulub crater buried under Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula?

About 200 kilometres: the Chicxulub crater, centred near the Yucatán town of the same name, is some 180 to 200 kilometres across and was gouged by an asteroid roughly ten kilometres wide.

Which two geophysicists searching for oil discovered the Chicxulub crater in the late 1970s?

Antonio Camargo and Glen Penfield, geophysicists working for the Mexican oil company Pemex, identified the buried ring structure from gravity and magnetic surveys in 1978; its link to the impact was confirmed in 1991.

Who discovered the Burgess Shale in 1909?

Charles Walcott, head of the Smithsonian Institution, found the Burgess Shale in August 1909 and returned almost every year until 1924, amassing over 65,000 specimens.

The Burgess Shale fossils, in the Canadian Rockies, date to which period?

It preserves soft parts of middle Cambrian animals.

In what year was the Piltdown Man hoax definitively exposed?

1953: fluorine tests and microscopy by Kenneth Oakley, Joseph Weiner and Wilfrid Le Gros Clark showed in November 1953 that the 1912 Piltdown skull combined a medieval human cranium with an orangutan jaw.

Which amateur archaeologist was identified in 2016 as the perpetrator of the Piltdown hoax?

Charles Dawson, the solicitor and amateur archaeologist who 'found' the Piltdown remains in 1912, was identified as the sole forger by a 2016 study led by Isabelle De Groote, which matched the techniques used on every specimen.

Who described the Taung Child, a juvenile hominin skull from South Africa, in 1925?

Raymond Dart, an Australian anatomist at the University of the Witwatersrand, described the Taung Child in Nature in February 1925, proposing it as a 'man-ape' and the first evidence that humanity originated in Africa.

To which species does the Taung Child belong?

Australopithecus africanus: Dart named the species in 1925 from the Taung skull, whose forward-placed foramen magnum indicated upright walking despite a chimp-sized brain.

Which Swedish geneticist won the 2022 Nobel Prize for work on the genomes of extinct hominins?

Svante Pääbo won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for sequencing the Neanderthal genome and discovering the Denisovans; he founded the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

Lactase persistence, the ability to digest milk as an adult, is especially high in which population?

Northern Europeans: lactase persistence reaches around 90 percent in Scandinavia and the British Isles, driven by a mutation near the LCT gene that spread with dairying in the last 10,000 years; most people worldwide lose lactase after weaning.

Which two scientists first noticed the 'molecular clock' in hemoglobin differences in 1962?

Émile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling compared haemoglobin sequences across species in 1962 and found differences accumulating at a roughly constant rate, the basis of the molecular clock.

Which German term did Bernhard Rensch use for what is now called a ring species?

Rassenkreis, 'circle of races', was Bernhard Rensch's 1929 term for a chain of interbreeding neighbouring populations whose end members cannot interbreed; the English phrase 'ring species' came later.

Which German biologist founded cladistics, beginning the work as a prisoner of war in 1945?

Willi Hennig, a specialist in true flies, drafted his Grundzüge einer Theorie der phylogenetischen Systematik as a prisoner of war in 1945 and published it in 1950, founding cladistics.

What are the shared derived characteristics used as evidence in cladistics called?

Synapomorphies are shared derived characters, novelties inherited from a common ancestor, such as feathers in birds; plesiomorphies are ancestral states, and a clade is an ancestor plus all its descendants.

Which Swede formalised binomial nomenclature and is called the father of modern taxonomy?

Carl Linnaeus published the first edition of Systema Naturae in the Netherlands in 1735 and was ennobled as Carl von Linné in 1761.

In which Kent village did Darwin live and work from 1842 until his death?

Downe: Darwin bought Down House in the village of Downe, near Bromley, in 1842 and wrote On the Origin of Species there; English Heritage took over the house in 1996.

In what year did Darwin publish The Descent of Man?

Published in 1871, it applied evolutionary theory to humans and detailed his theory of sexual selection.

To which family member did Darwin send Descent of Man chapters for editing?

His daughter Henrietta: Darwin sent Henrietta, then in her late twenties, the proofs and draft chapters of The Descent of Man to edit in 1870, and also took advice from his wife Emma to avoid damaging inferences.

Richard Dawkins was named the first holder of which Oxford professorship in 1995?

Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science: the chair, endowed by software engineer Charles Simonyi, was created for Dawkins in 1995 and he held it until 2008, when Marcus du Sautoy succeeded him.

People carrying one copy of the sickle cell allele gain some resistance to which disease?

This heterozygote advantage keeps the allele common where malaria is endemic.

Whose 1943 fluctuation test showed that bacterial mutations arise randomly, not in response to need?

Luria and Delbrück: their 1943 fluctuation test showed phage-resistant mutants arise in E. coli cultures before exposure to the virus, proving mutations occur at random rather than being induced, work recognised by the 1969 Nobel Prize.

How old was Mary Anning when she found the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton?

Twelve: Mary Anning, born in 1799, uncovered the skeleton in 1812 after her brother Joseph found the skull the year before; the specimen was the first ichthyosaur to be correctly identified.

In which Dorset town did Mary Anning collect her Jurassic marine fossils?

Lyme Regis: Anning collected along the Blue Lias cliffs of Lyme Regis on Dorset's Jurassic Coast, where winter landslides exposed new fossils that had to be grabbed before the sea took them.

What does the species name Homo habilis mean?

Handy man: Louis Leakey, Phillip Tobias and John Napier named Homo habilis in 1964 for its presumed use of stone tools; it lived about 2.4 to 1.65 million years ago.

Which species is the 4.4-million-year-old partial skeleton from Ethiopia's Afar region, described in 2009?

Ardipithecus ramidus: the skeleton nicknamed 'Ardi', found at Aramis in the Middle Awash from 1994 and described in 2009, shows a 4.4-million-year-old hominin that climbed trees yet walked upright on the ground.

What collective nickname is given to Leakey's protégées Goodall, Fossey and Galdikas?

The Trimates: Leakey recruited Goodall to study chimpanzees in 1960, Fossey for mountain gorillas in 1966 and Galdikas for orangutans in 1971, believing living apes would illuminate early human behaviour.

At which Tanzanian site did Louis and Mary Leakey make their famous discoveries?

Olduvai Gorge, in the eastern Serengeti, is where Mary Leakey found the Zinjanthropus skull in 1959 and where the Leakeys named Homo habilis; Mary also classified the gorge's Oldowan stone tools.

In what were the famous Laetoli hominin footprints preserved?

Volcanic ash: about 3.66 million years ago hominins walked across freshly fallen ash dampened by rain, which then hardened; Mary Leakey's team found the tracks in 1976, strong evidence for Pliocene bipedalism.

How far is Laetoli from Olduvai Gorge, which lies to its north?

45 km south: Laetoli lies about 45 kilometres south of Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania; the footprint trail found in 1976 was excavated by 1978.

Which extinct ape's first fossil skull, believed ancestral to humans, did Mary Leakey discover?

Proconsul: on Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria in 1948, Mary Leakey found the first skull of Proconsul, a Miocene ape about 18 million years old then thought to be a common ancestor of apes and humans.

On which island did Wallace say he was when he wrote his 1858 natural selection paper?

Ternate: Wallace dated his 1858 essay on natural selection from the island of Ternate in the Moluccas, though his journal suggests he wrote it on neighbouring Gilolo (Halmahera).

Which physician and poet of the Midlands Enlightenment was grandfather to the author of the Origin of Species?

Erasmus Darwin, a Lichfield physician, wrote Zoonomia (1794–96) and the poem The Temple of Nature, which stated that all life descended from a common ancestor; his grandson Charles published the Origin in 1859.

How many Italian wall lizards were moved to the islet of Pod Mrčaru in 1971, founding a fast-evolving colony?

Ten: in 1971 Eviatar Nevo's team moved five breeding pairs of Podarcis sicula from Pod Kopište to Pod Mrčaru, 3.5 km away; a 2008 study found the descendants had bigger heads, stronger bites and new gut valves.

Dmitry Belyayev's famous fox-domestication experiment took place at an institute in which Siberian city?

Novosibirsk: Belyayev ran the experiment from 1959 at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Akademgorodok, breeding silver foxes for a single behavioural trait; droopy ears and patchy coats followed, a 'domestication syndrome' questioned in 2019.

In 1975, Japanese scientists found bacteria digesting man-made waste compounds in ponds beside what?

A nylon factory: in 1975 Kinoshita and colleagues found Flavobacterium strain KI72 in a pond near a nylon plant in Japan, digesting 6-aminohexanoate by-products that did not exist before nylon's invention in 1935.

Which geneticist proposed in 1984 that a nylon-digesting enzyme arose by frameshift mutation?

Susumu Ohno argued in 1984 that a single inserted base in a duplicated, arginine-rich 427-codon reading frame created a 392-amino-acid nylon-digesting enzyme by frameshift; later work traced the enzyme to an existing esterase instead.

Who discovered the first living coelacanth among a fisherman's catch in South Africa in December 1938?

Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, curator of the East London museum, spotted the fish in Captain Hendrik Goosen's catch on 22 December 1938; J. L. B. Smith identified it, and the genus Latimeria honours her.

The second living coelacanth species, found in the late 1990s, lives in the seas of which country?

Indonesia: Latimeria menadoensis was spotted in a Manado fish market in Sulawesi in 1997 by Mark Erdmann and described in 1999; the first species, L. chalumnae, lives off the Comoros and South Africa.

The word 'coelacanth' refers to which feature of the first fossil named by Agassiz in 1839?

Hollow caudal fin rays: Agassiz coined Coelacanthus, 'hollow spine', in 1839 for a fossil whose tail-fin rays were hollow; the group's body shapes were far more varied in the deep past than today.

Dark-coated rock pocket mice living on black basalt show a perfect link between colour and which gene?

Michael Nachman's 2003 study found the Pinacate mice's melanism tied to the melanocortin-1 receptor, though New Mexico mice went dark another way.

Hawaiian honeycreepers descend from which bird family, arriving on the islands millions of years ago?

Finches: DNA studies led by Heather Lerner in 2011 showed the Hawaiian honeycreepers descend from a Eurasian rosefinch ancestor that reached the islands roughly seven million years ago and radiated into dozens of species.

The horse's 50-million-year evolution transformed which dog-sized forest dweller into the modern single-toed animal?

Eohippus, the 'dawn horse' of about 55 million years ago, was a dog-sized browser with four toes on its front feet; most of the lineage's later evolution toward the single-toed Equus happened in North America.

The London Underground mosquito was first described in the 18th century from specimens collected where?

Peter Forsskål named it Culex molestus for its voracious biting; despite the name it long predates the Tube.