Evolution, Genetics & Classification Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the pattern shown by genes on the X chromosome, which affects males far more often because they carry only one X, so a single recessive version is enough: red-green colour blindness and haemophilia are the stock examples, the latter tracked through the royal houses descended from Queen Victoria?

Question 2

Which small insect, drawn to overripe fruit, has been the central animal of genetics for over a century because it breeds in about ten days, is cheap to keep by the thousand, has only four pairs of chromosomes, and shows clear inherited oddities such as white eyes and curled wings?

Question 3

What is the name for identifying a specimen to species by reading a short, standard stretch of its DNA, a particular mitochondrial gene in animals, and matching it against a reference library, a method used to expose mislabelled seafood, police the timber trade and survey the small life of a habitat?

Question 4

Which friar, working in a monastery garden in the 1860s, crossed tens of thousands of pea plants, tracked traits such as flower colour and seed shape through the generations, and showed that inheritance comes in discrete units passed on in fixed numerical ratios?

Question 5

What is the name for a group that consists of an ancestor together with every one of its descendants and nothing left out, the only kind of group that a strict branching classification will accept; birds together with crocodiles and all other reptiles form one, but reptiles without birds do not?

Question 6

What is the name for the rejected idea that features an organism develops during its own life, such as bigger muscles from exercise or a neck stretched by reaching, are passed on to its offspring, an idea linked to an early French evolutionist and disastrously revived in Soviet farming under Lysenko?

Question 7

What is the name for the simple grid used to predict the outcome of a genetic cross, with the possible sex-cell types of one parent written along the top and those of the other down the side, and each inner box showing one possible combination in the offspring?

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About Evolution, Genetics & Classification

This quiz is about how life changes and how we make sense of its variety: the idea of evolution and the people who built it, the fossil evidence, the rules of inheritance from Mendel's peas to the double helix and the genetic code, the machinery of classification from Linnaeus to the tree of life, the great chapters of deep time and human origins, and the modern techniques of cloning, gene editing and DNA identification. One hundred questions in five packs, each describing an idea, a pioneer, a law, a molecule, a process or a group and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz, not a picture quiz.

The first pack is evolution itself: natural selection and the men who found it, common descent, adaptation, leftover and shared and look-alike structures, sexual selection, the peppered moth, the fanning-out of island groups, chance changes in small populations, the founder and bottleneck effects, speciation, the fossil record and its in-between forms, the discarded Lamarckian idea, the stop-start tempo of change, and the molecular clock.

The second pack is classical genetics: Mendel, the gene and the allele, dominant and recessive, genotype and phenotype, the two laws and the Punnett square, blended and joint expression, the ABO blood groups, X-linked conditions, the X and Y switch, linkage and crossing over, Morgan's fruit flies, ordinary and reduction division, the chromosome miscount behind Down syndrome, and traits ruled by many genes at once.

The third pack is molecular genetics: DNA and the double helix, Rosalind Franklin, the base-pairing rule, the one-way flow of information, transcription and translation, the triplet codon, Har Gobind Khorana, the ribosome, replication, mutations large and small, the sickle-cell and malaria trade-off, mitochondrial DNA, the Human Genome Project, DNA fingerprinting, epigenetics and the model organisms.

The fourth pack is classification: Linnaeus and the two-word name, the ladder of ranks, the species and the type specimen, the three domains and the eukaryotes, cladistics and the clade, all-descendants versus leaves-some-out groups, the phylogenetic tree, the last universal common ancestor, the outgroup, DNA barcoding, ring species and subspecies, Haeckel and Mayr, the fungal kingdom and the phylum.

The fifth pack is deep time and its uses: the Cambrian explosion, the Big Five extinctions and the worst of them, the asteroid at the end of the Cretaceous, the 'living fossil', Lucy and the walking apes, Homo erectus, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, Out of Africa, selective breeding, genetically modified crops, Dolly the sheep, gene therapy, the fruit fly, heritability, kin selection, Batesian mimicry, the modern synthesis and J. B. S. Haldane.

The wrong answers are always other ideas, people or terms of the same kind. About a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph of fossils in rock, museum specimen drawers, pea flowers or a microscope, chosen because it names no answer and so cannot point to any option. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.