Exercises on the theory of evolution

After the propagation of ideas about the evolution of species, natural selection, etc., in the second half of the 19th century, there were attempts to interpret the social organization of men in the light of evolutionism. These attempts were named:

a) sociology of culture

b) Social Darwinism

c) human sociophysiology

d) Malthusianism

e) vitalism

(UERJ – modified ) Recently, researchers at University College London, analyzing the DNA of skeletons of human beings who lived in Europe in the Neolithic period, showed that these first Europeans did not have the lactase gene, an enzyme necessary for the efficient digestion of milk. The random appearance of this gene represented a highly advantageous competitive trait for the species, increasing its frequency in the population. This hypothesis is an example of the transformist proposition called:

a) Mendelism

b) Creationism

c) Lamarckism

d) Neo-Darwinism

e) Sociology

When he began to elaborate the intuitions that would come to compose the theory of the evolution of the species, Charles Darwin was surprised to realize that he was not alone in this kind of reflection, because:

a) Aristotle already spoke of the evolution of species.

b) Gustav Le Bon had developed a doctrine on natural selection in the early 19th century.

c) Thomas Malthus had prepared a book on the same subject in the same year.

d) Alfred Russel Wallace was developing the same idea at the same time as Darwin.

e) None of the alternatives.

(UEL) Charles Darwin, in addition to postulating that living organisms evolved through the action of natural selection, also considered the possibility that the first forms of life appeared in some tepid lake on our planet. However, there are other theories that try to explain how and where life arose. One of them, panspermia, holds that:

a) The first forms of life may have emerged in the most inhospitable regions of the Earth, such as hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the oceans.

b) Simple organic compounds, such as amino acids, may have been produced abiotically at various points on planet Earth.

c) Ancestral bacteria may have appeared all over the Earth, depending on the minimum requirements necessary for their formation and subsistence.

d) The replication capacity of the first organic molecules was what allowed them to diffuse through the Earth's primitive oceans.

e) Life originated outside Planet Earth, having been brought by meteorites, comets or space dust.

Letter B

Social Darwinism is a philosophical doctrine attributed to the Englishman Herbert Spencer (1820-1903). Spencer used the postulations of Charles Darwin developed in The Origin of Species in order to apply them to the understanding of human relationships. According to Spencer, human social organization would follow certain assumptions theorized by Darwin about the relationship between animals, such as natural selection, competition, etc.

Letter D

Neo-Darwinism, or synthetic theory of evolution, postulates that some individuals of a certain species, in addition to having gone through the process of natural selection, also experience some variations resulting from mutations that occur at random. This characteristic made the individuals more competitive within the group and, in this way, their descendants managed to prevail.

Letter D

Alfred Wallace (1823-1913) was a British naturalist, like Darwin, and a friend of Darwin. The two had individually made expeditions around the world and exchanged impressions via correspondence. In February 1858, Wallace sent an essay to Darwin in which he postulated reflections on the evolution of species. Darwin was reportedly surprised by the material, as he was also developing a work on the same subject, which was published in November of the following year (1859).

Letter E

Panspermia was theoretically elaborated by the German physician, physicist and philosopher of the second half of the 19th century, called Hemann von Helmholtz, who believed that life would have originated from germinal components (or particles) from space by meteors. This doctrine went back to the hypotheses of the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras. In addition to Helmholtz, the theory of panspermia was endorsed by the English physicist William Thomson, also known as Lord Kelvin.