Evolution quiz

More questions about Evolution

These visible examples show the question style. LearnClash turns the full topic into ranked duels and spaced repetition.

1. 1 Easy

   Which wild plant became broccoli, kale and cauliflower?

   Answer: Wild cabbage

   Why: Breeders favoured different parts of one plant: leaves for kale, the stem for kohlrabi, flower buds for broccoli.

2. 2 Medium

   Which part of your cells was once a free-living bacterium?

   Answer: Mitochondria

   Why: Like the bacteria they came from, mitochondria still carry their own small loop of DNA.

3. 3 Hard

   Which idea claimed evolution has an innate direction?

   Answer: Orthogenesis

   Why: Orthogenesis was discarded because natural selection operates strictly on present survival advantages without any predetermined goal.

4. 4 Easy

   What does the selecting in natural selection?

   Answer: The environment

   Why: Once Britain's 1956 Clean Air Act cut soot, dark peppered moths declined and the pale form became common again.

5. 5 Medium

   What must offspring be for parents to count as one species?

   Answer: Fertile

   Why: Horses and donkeys can breed, but their mules are almost always sterile, so they stay two species.

6. 6 Hard

   What model describes long stability broken by rapid change?

   Answer: Punctuated equilibrium

   Why: Eldredge and Gould proposed the model to explain why transitional fossils are rare during long spans of morphological stasis.