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Quiz about Evidence for Evolution Discovery by Debate
Quiz about Evidence for Evolution Discovery by Debate

Evidence for Evolution- Discovery by Debate Quiz


I often engage in lively discussions with creationists who dispute the veracity of evolution. While researching, I have discovered some truly wonderful facts that support the theory of evolution.

A multiple-choice quiz by crisw. Estimated time: 7 mins.
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Author
crisw
Time
7 mins
Type
Multiple Choice
Quiz #
270,277
Updated
Jul 23 22
# Qns
10
Difficulty
Tough
Avg Score
5 / 10
Plays
1084
Awards
Top 10% Quiz
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Question 1 of 10
1. Note- "Creationists" in this quiz refers to young-earth creationists who believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old.

The Karoo Formation in Africa contains the remains of an estimated 800 billion vertebrate fossils, mostly of therapsid dinosaurs (the ancestors of mammals). Creationists claim that they were all buried at once in the Noahchian flood. If these animals were all alive at once, there would be 2100 of them per acre. Creationists state that this is not a problem because reptiles today live at much higher densities than this. What is the main problem with this argument?
Hint


Question 2 of 10
2. As organisms get more complicated, the size of their genomes (as measured by weight of the DNA in picograms per cell) increases.


Question 3 of 10
3. Creationists claim that evolution never produces "new information." However, there are many ways that new information occurs. One of the commonest is gene duplication- when part or all of a gene is duplicated and retained in the cell. The organism still retains a working copy of the gene, so the duplicate is free to mutate. Which of the following adaptations probably did NOT evolve from gene duplication? Hint


Question 4 of 10
4. There are many current theories of how complex organic molecules, a necessary precursor to life, evolved. One of these theories involves bubbles of iron sulfide, which (to simplify a theory greatly!)could serve as protective "cell walls" while chemical reactions that depended on iron and sulfur and could produce organic molecules occurred inside. Where are these iron-sulfur bubbles found? Hint


Question 5 of 10
5. Creationists often claim that evolution is "JUST a theory" as though this somehow makes evolution less likely. Alas for creationists, atomic theory, the theory of gravity, germ theory, electromagnetic theory, etc. etc, are every bit as much JUST theories as evolution is. What, exactly, do scientists mean by "theory"? Hint


Question 6 of 10
6. The ragworm, a marine invertebrate that looks like a centipede but is a type of annelid worm, holds an interesting clue to eye evolution. What is it? Hint


Question 7 of 10
7. The sialic acid, N-glycolylneuraminic acid (Neu5Gc), is found in many animals but not in humans. It has a role in cell metabolism. Which of the following is NOT true? Hint


Question 8 of 10
8. Creationists claim that lava from the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, when submitted to a lab for radiometric dating, gave results that it was hundreds of thousands of years old rather than less than fifteen years old. They thus claim that all radiometric data is in error. Why did the creationists get these results? Hint


Question 9 of 10
9. Creationists often criticize evolution for not having an answer to how the universe formed. Should evolutionary theory be able to explain this?


Question 10 of 10
10. In 1971, scientists released ten lizards from Italy onto a small island. 37 years later, they surveyed the population, which had grown to 5000 lizards. What did they find? Hint



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Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. Note- "Creationists" in this quiz refers to young-earth creationists who believe that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. The Karoo Formation in Africa contains the remains of an estimated 800 billion vertebrate fossils, mostly of therapsid dinosaurs (the ancestors of mammals). Creationists claim that they were all buried at once in the Noahchian flood. If these animals were all alive at once, there would be 2100 of them per acre. Creationists state that this is not a problem because reptiles today live at much higher densities than this. What is the main problem with this argument?

Answer: The reptiles that live at high densities today are *much* smaller

Some reptiles today live at densities of 20,000- 30,000 per acre- but they are tiny lizards! 30,000 of them weigh much less than 100 pounds. The average size of a therapsid dinosaur from the Karoo was somewhere between the size of a fox and a wolf. Evan at the fox-sized 10 pounds per animal (rather than 80-120 for a wolf) that's 21,000 pounds per acre- a bit more than the weight of an average African elephant! Obviously, a density of one elephant per acre isn't supportable for very long...
2. As organisms get more complicated, the size of their genomes (as measured by weight of the DNA in picograms per cell) increases.

Answer: False

There is no relationship between how complicated we perceive an organism to be and its genome size. The organism with the largest genome is an amoeba, Chaos chaos. The average pine tree has a larger genome than the average mammal. The vertebrate with the largest genome is a primitive lungfish. The primate with the largest genome is a tarsier. All of the great apes have larger genomes than humans.

Evolution explains this easily, because much of the DNA in cells does not code for anything (junk DNA) and there are many ways in which DNA can be added to a genome. It is a common misconception that evolution has a "goal" of increased complexity- in reality, evolution has no goals at all.
3. Creationists claim that evolution never produces "new information." However, there are many ways that new information occurs. One of the commonest is gene duplication- when part or all of a gene is duplicated and retained in the cell. The organism still retains a working copy of the gene, so the duplicate is free to mutate. Which of the following adaptations probably did NOT evolve from gene duplication?

Answer: Resistance to the AIDS virus in some Europeans

The AIDS resistance resulted from a gene deletion in a protein called CCR5. The AIDS virus normally uses this protein to enter cells. People with one copy of the modified gene are resistant to AIDS; people with two copies seem to be immune to it.

The other adaptations all arose from gene duplication with subsequent modification- protease digestive enzyme in the cod, a clotting factor in the snakes, and multiple incidents of gene duplication in the mosquitoes.
4. There are many current theories of how complex organic molecules, a necessary precursor to life, evolved. One of these theories involves bubbles of iron sulfide, which (to simplify a theory greatly!)could serve as protective "cell walls" while chemical reactions that depended on iron and sulfur and could produce organic molecules occurred inside. Where are these iron-sulfur bubbles found?

Answer: Deep-sea thermal vents

The iron-sulfur bubbles, which occur near deep-sea vents that exude warm, mineralized water, provide a protective "shell." Within the shell, the iron-sulfur serves as a substrate that can catalyze many reactions. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, for example, both plentiful in the waters near such vents, can form acetates, a crucial molecule in organic biology, in such bubbles.

Indeed, even in bacteria today, metabolism depends on acetates that are produced by enzymes that possess the same catalytic composition of iron, sulfur and nickel that is found in the bubbles.
5. Creationists often claim that evolution is "JUST a theory" as though this somehow makes evolution less likely. Alas for creationists, atomic theory, the theory of gravity, germ theory, electromagnetic theory, etc. etc, are every bit as much JUST theories as evolution is. What, exactly, do scientists mean by "theory"?

Answer: A testable and falsifiable concept that explains a given phenomenon based on available facts

Creationists rarely dispute gravity, disease causation by germs or the structure of the atom, even though these are very bit as much "theories" as evolution is.
6. The ragworm, a marine invertebrate that looks like a centipede but is a type of annelid worm, holds an interesting clue to eye evolution. What is it?

Answer: They have two types of photoreceptors; one found in vertebrates and one in invertebrates

Photoreceptors are cells that sense light. Arthropods and vertebrates have two types of these cells. Vertebrates have ciliary photoreceptors, while arthropods have rhabdomeric photoreceptors. The two types are built by the same gene set and have the same function, but are structured differently.

Ragworms and other polychaete annelid worms are thought to be the last common ancestor of insects and vertebrates. And, when scientists examined ragworms, they found that they have both types of photoreceptors. The rhabdomeric type are found in the ragworm's eye, while the ciliary type are found in a light-sensing organ in the brain.

Ragworms also possess the precursor to what became the hypothalamus in animals with more developed brains.
7. The sialic acid, N-glycolylneuraminic acid (Neu5Gc), is found in many animals but not in humans. It has a role in cell metabolism. Which of the following is NOT true?

Answer: Great apes also don't have a working Neu5Gc gene

Cells are covered with chains of complex sugars. At the end of these chains are often various compounds called sialic acids, which help, among other things to regulate water metabolism in cells.

One particular sialic acid, N-glycolylneuraminic acid, is found widely throughout the animal kingdom, including in the great apes. However, humans do not normally produce this particular sialic acid. This isn't because we have lost or never had the gene necessary to do so; instead, this gene has been deactivated by a mutation, and genetic analysis showed that this mutation is approximately 2.9 million years old- after we split from the branch of the primate tree that went on to become chimpanzees and bonobos, and about the same time that a tremendous growth spurt in hominid brain size occurred.

Several scientists have speculated that this mutation helped allow the growth of human brains and also may have allowed human populations to grow due to conferring some disease resistance.

In another fascinating implication, scientists studied the prevalence of variants of this gene in different human populations , which supported a multiple African origin for all human races.

Research has also shown that some tumors can turn the gene back on and produce N-glycolylneuraminic acid.
8. Creationists claim that lava from the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, when submitted to a lab for radiometric dating, gave results that it was hundreds of thousands of years old rather than less than fifteen years old. They thus claim that all radiometric data is in error. Why did the creationists get these results?

Answer: All of these

The tests were performed in 1993 by a team led by creationist Steve Austin. The samples of dacite lava that they collected contained xenoliths- pieces of rock that were much older. They submitted their samples for potassium-argon (K-Ar) dating to Geochron Labs, whose website carried a very plain disclaimer that "We cannot analyze samples expected to be younger than 2 M.Y. [million years old]" One of the creationist team members stated "The only information provided to the laboratory was that the samples came from dacite and that "low argon" should be expected.

The laboratory was not told that the specimen came from the lava dome at Mount St. Helens and was only 10 years old." The creationists ran only the K-Ar test; they did not do any of the other tests that would corroborate their findings.
9. Creationists often criticize evolution for not having an answer to how the universe formed. Should evolutionary theory be able to explain this?

Answer: No

Evolution deals solely with how life changed once it was here. It isn't intended to tell us about how life got here in the first place. Evolutionary theory isn't intended to explain the Big Bang or abiogenesis any more than the theory of gravity is intended to tell us why malarial parasites cause disease.
10. In 1971, scientists released ten lizards from Italy onto a small island. 37 years later, they surveyed the population, which had grown to 5000 lizards. What did they find?

Answer: The lizards already were very different from those on the mainland

Even though it's difficult to observe species evolving, because it normally happens on a timescale much larger than what humans would notice, it has been observed not just once, but many times.

A recent example of observation of evolution by "Darwinian means" is the incredibly quick evolution of Italian wall lizards on the isle of Pod Mrcaru, as detailed by National Geographic. In 1971, researchers introduced five pairs of lizards to the island. Thirty-seven years later, there are over 5000 lizards on the island, all descended, according to DNA testing, from the original ten lizards. In this amazingly short time period, the originally insectivorous lizards evolved adaptations to a vegetarian diet, stronger jaws, and a different social structure. They are well on their way to becoming a different species entirely.
Source: Author crisw

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