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Overview:
Students "take a trip" to the Greater Antilles to figure out how the Anolis lizards on the islands might have evolved.Author/Source:
Collins, Jennifer Grade level:
9-12 Time:
Two class periods. Teaching tips:
Before beginning this lesson, students should understand that phylogenetic trees (cladograms) are hypotheses of how a set of organisms are related. Concepts: - Biological evolution accounts for diversity over long periods of time.
- Traits that confer an advantage may persist in the population and are called adaptations.
- Speciation is the splitting of one ancestral lineage into two or more descendent lineages.
- Speciation requires reproductive isolation.
- Occupying new environments can provide new selection pressures and new opportunities, leading to speciation.
- Scientists test their ideas using multiple lines of evidence.
- Scientists can test ideas about events and processes long past, very distant, and not directly observable.
- Scientific knowledge is open to question and revision as we come up with new ideas and discover new evidence.
- Scientists use multiple research methods (experiments, observational research, comparative research, and modeling) to collect data.
- Science is a human endeavor.
- Our knowledge of the evolution of living things is always being refined as we gather more evidence.
- Our understanding of life through time is based upon multiple lines of evidence.
- Scientists use the similarity of DNA nucleotide sequences to infer the relatedness of taxa.
- Scientists use anatomical evidence to infer the relatedness of taxa.
- Scientists use the geographic distribution of fossils and living things to learn about the history of life.
- Scientists use experimental evidence to study evolutionary processes.
- Classification is based on evolutionary relationships.
- Evolutionary trees (i.e., phylogenies or cladograms) are built from multiple lines of evidence.
- Scientists may explore many different hypotheses to explain their observations.
Teacher background: |
