AP®︎ Biology: Topic 7.6 Flashcards

Scientific support from fossils, anatomy, molecules, geography, and quantitative analysis showing organisms changed over time.

The geographic distribution of species and populations across regions, islands, and barriers.

The ordered collection of fossils in rock layers documenting past life and evolutionary change.

Relative dating using rock layer positions to infer whether fossils are older or younger.

Absolute dating that uses radioactive isotope decay rates to estimate the age of rocks or fossils.

Radiometric dating of recent organic remains using carbon-14 decay, effective to about 50,000 years.

Reduced or nonfunctional remnants of features that were functional in ancestors.

Analysis of nucleotide similarity among organisms to infer relatedness and common ancestry.

Analysis of amino acid similarity in proteins to infer evolutionary relationships among organisms.

Nearly all organisms use the same codon-to-amino-acid system for protein synthesis.

A method estimating divergence time from the accumulation of DNA or protein sequence differences.

Branching diagrams that represent hypothesized evolutionary relationships based on shared ancestry.

Similar anatomy from common ancestry is homologous, while similar function without shared origin is analogous.

The idea that different species descended from shared ancestral populations in the past.