Pop quiz on evolution

January 25, 2016 • 12:30 pm

Okay, how much do you know about evolution? Futurity has a pop quiz comprising 7 questions. Some of them are a bit ambiguous, but take the test anyway, which should take about three minutes.

My score is below, but given that I’m a professional evolutionary biologist, I would have been chagrined had I done worse. Give your score below—and beef at some of the questions if you want.

Screen Shot 2016-01-25 at 11.24.14 AM

h/t: Steve

193 thoughts on “Pop quiz on evolution”

  1. Woo hoo! 100% here. Can I be an evolutionary biology professor now, too? 😉

    (And, yes, there was some ambiguity in a couple of poorly worded questions.)

    1. 100%

      It starts off with easy ones then tries to trip you up with common misconceptions. Just have to keep in mind what evolution actually is, and in particular that it doesn’t (can’t) have goals beyond survival.

    1. 100%, and I’m a biologist but not an evolutionary biologist.

      I didn’t like their explanation on #6. I don’t see why number of species is a particularly good measure of diversity. And I suspect bacteria have far more diversity than insects.

          2. I’m trying to figure out how to work that in as the physics version of “always a bridesmaid, never a bride.”

  5. I missed leaves. I have no formal science education. That’s the only excuse I’ve got. I’m still chagrined.

    3. I interpreted the leaves question as meaning the change of colour in autumnal leaves is an evolutionary outcome (just as the constant colour of evergreens is an evolutionary outcome). The intended meaning of the question didn’t register at all.

    4. Exactly my result…I figured deciduous trees evolved both leaves and the “ability” to shed them as a way to preserve energy for the next growing season. Oh well, I thought the reason I was incorrect makes sense.

    5. I’m in this club. I took “an example of evolution” to include a result of evolution, which of course all biological units are. I hated questions like this in school.

      1. Yes. I got 100%, but I am a professional biologist and a professional teacher to boot, so I saw the “rails” of thinking behind the test. But I didn’t like it. To me, it’s not inspiring, not funny, cannot interest the reader.

      1. 8th. But in my defence I do think leaf colour changing (and shedding) is obviously a response to environmental conditions and, as they note as a requirement, is passed along to succeeding generations. The fact that there are fall colours is merely chemistry….but if deciduosity is NOT evolutionary why are there no deciduous trees at treeline? and there aren’t – I’ve been there and seen there! It’s too cold for them.

      2. I agree with you all about the ambiguity of the ‘leaves’ question (though I got it ‘correct’).

        cr

          1. Me three. But since any and every biological phenomenon is in some way an “example of evolution” I figured they figured they were teasing out a misunderstanding of some sort, so I answered “no”. Really badly written question.

    7. I got leaves right but only because I misunderstood the question. So I got 100% but by accident. And I know little more about evolution than having read PCC’s book years ago.

    8. Don’t be. It’s a rubbish question, because no one can say that it is or isn’t an evolved trait. All we can say is that no one knows of a particular selection pressure to drive the change right now.

      1. Furthermore, the quiz was about “evolution,” not natural selection, so I figured neutrality & drift were in the equation anyway.

    9. Same here (6/7) – I also interpreted the question as ‘discolouring and shedding of leaves is an evolutionary adaptation”. Poorly worded question.

        1. Well, that has been more or less the traditional explanation; but apparently there are additional thoughts about the matter now. Excerpt from that link I keep posting: 😀

          “Deciduous plants were traditionally believed to shed their leaves in autumn primarily because the high costs involved in their maintenance would outweigh the benefits from photosynthesis during the winter period of low light availability and cold temperatures.[11] In many cases this turned out to be over-simplistic — other factors involved include insect predation,[12] water loss, and damage from high winds or snowfall.

          Anthocyanins, responsible for red-purple coloration, are actively produced in autumn, but not involved in leaf-drop. A number of hypotheses on the role of pigment production in leaf-drop have been proposed, and generally fall into two categories: interaction with animals, and protection from non-biological factors.[6]
          “

    11. I got it wrong in honor of my former PhD advisor, W.D. Hamilton, who had an interesting (and evolutionary!) hypothesis about leaves changing color. I figured the quiz wouldn’t know that, though. So we are in good company.

    12. The leaves one (and a few others) made me pause, but I decided to interpret them in the most literal possible fashion which ended up being right. The changing color of leaves might be adaptive and is definitely the result of evolution (like every other trait), but it’s not an act of evolution itself.

    1. That was me. I got 100%, but the complexity one had me wanting to answer “not necessarily.”

      I have no formal science education, except for a very small amount in the first couple of years at high school. I did read WEIT though.

    2. Same with me. And since I did answer “not necessarily” in my head, I had to check the false answer.

    3. I got it because I remembered someone (PZ?) talking about parasites and how they are less complex then the species they evolved from.

  7. I’m pumped that I aced it! I admit that I paused on the leaf question. I couldn’t think of a reason why it would be an example of evolution. I also admit that I’m just about finished reading your book and that it actually helped me with this quiz. For example, I just read the brief section that explains that organisms don’t always evolve to greater complexity. So, I was ready for that one! How do you put a screenshot on here?

  9. 100%. But the question about whether leaves changing color in the Fall is an example of evolution had me pause for a bit b/c that they do so is a result of natural selection.

      1. Some plants shut down photosynthesis as the days get short. The benefits of photosynthesis no longer outweigh the costs during short and cold days. So this response to the seasons would be the result of natural selection for these plants.
        Since the photosynthetic pigments are no longer being replenished these gradually disappear. The green chlorophylls fade 1st, while the yellow/orange carotenoids last longer. So leaves change from green –> yellow or orange since the lack of green reveals the other pigments that were always there.
        Finally, the leaves are shed since these photosynthetic organs are no longer being used. The nutrient content of the leaves is returned to the soil, and the plants can reclaim some of that thru their roots.

        1. Without knowing the details (I’m not a biologist) I suspected that was a result of evolution, but obviously not evolution in action. But it was a rather fine hair to split, IMO.

          cr

  10. Hint i think all answers were false i picked true for a couple thinking they can’t all be false.

    1. I wonder if pessimists performed better on average compared with optimists.

      I got 100% 😛

  13. Bugger. I over-thunk a rather ambiguous #4. I didn’t “get” that the questioner was asking about the color change as being an example of evolutionary *change*. Had it been worded that way, it would’ve been obvious to me. As it was, I overthunk it, and answered True, as the various Red/Yellow pigments, chlorophyll, plus how everything works together seasonally… mechanisms of cell death, etc. are all evolved things in the bigger picture.

    1. I agree. But i got that one right because I figured even if there were an explanation for the various pigments, it would only be a ‘just-so’ story without rigorous experimental testing.

    2. “I didn’t “get” that the questioner was asking about the color change as being an example of evolutionary *change*.”

      Because really, how could they possibly come up with such a stupid premise in the first place?!

      I think those of us who’re deriding ourselves for not “getting” this question are being too passive. It was an incredibly stupid question.

      1. I agree. Esp. after the reality check of looking at the comments here. If this was junior high and I was the teacher, I would’ve apologized to the class (something I’ve never done and would only do under extreme circumstances), thrown the question out, and tried to salvage some kind of lesson out of it. Free points, everybody.

  14. I’ll be damned – I got 100%. A couple I had to think about.
    Maybe I have my 1940s U of Chicago education to thank.

  15. I was corrected when I chose that leaves changing color in Autumn is an example of evolution. I think it obviously is an example of evolution. Trees have evolved to store their sap in the winter.

    Of course that doesn’t mean that the leaves “evolve” every year, but I didn’t realize the tester thought I might be dumb enough to think that.

    1. Concur. I missed the leaf question. There would be no changing of leaf color if the leaf was not going to fall or otherwise stop functioning. I assume that conifers and deciduous trees have a common ancestor. Conifer needles stay green year-round, eh?

    2. “I didn’t realize the tester thought I might be dumb enough to think that.”

      My thought exactly!

  17. The leaves question got me, too. The fact that they change color is a product of evolution, but the changing itself is not evolution in action. Poorly worded question.

    1. This is correct: it is a question in a way of proximate vs. ultimate – and I saw it that way. But I have been doing research on causation, so maybe I was primed.

      On the other hand, I had a problem with the “origin of life” thing, since there are theories of purely chemical evolution which feed into biological ones (with a grey area)!

  18. Easy peasy. I was a little too brain-weary just now to overthink it – which is what I often do.

  19. 6/7 Missed the clock question. I knew I was wrong before I hit the button because I’d seen the calendar on Cosmos.
    Couldn’t stop myself from hitting the red button. 🙂
    Knew leaves and beetles answers from reading WEIT posts and comments.

  20. I also had a different interpretation of the intention behind the leaves question. I’ve often found this with multiple choice questions.

    2. Seemed stupid to me that they gave the scores in terms of “ranges,” anyway, when there were in fact only 8 precise scores possible, no in-between ones.

    3. Shucks. I was going to post something like, “The quiz is fake! Look at those results for 60-69% correct! In no way would any kind of natural statistical distribution create such a gap! It’s a hoax!”

      But now I won’t. 😉

      1. That apparent pattern also caused me to hesitate quite a long time on the stupid leaves question; in the end I picked the wrong answer, though, despite my strong feeling that the test was trying to trick me to do just that, because it never occurred to me that anyone would think each little leaf was evolving something new in real time right at that moment…

  23. 7/7 for 100 percent, but I didn’t like the leaf changing color question. That the trees developed in a way so as that the leaves change color (in response to less light) IS an evolutionary adaptation, no?

  24. Got them all correct, I think False became a pattern. But owe it all to a Prof. Coyne because it has been many years since I saw a classroom and they did not teach much evolution at that time. If I did nothing but read the book and follow the site – I could make thru this small test.

  25. Okay – all false.

    The funniest part is binning of results in 10% increments – 90-100%, 80-89%, etc. with 7 questions there cannot be any 60-69% bin – and there are none…

    and only 100% fits the 90-100% bin… ah well.

  27. I got 100% and I’m a shop assistant. I had to think a bit about the leaf question for the same reason as others here, because losing leaves in winter is advantageous for the trees and could be selected for. If you hadn’t warned us some questions were ambiguous, I might have got that wrong.

    Fun little quiz! Is there any way we could get it posted to a creationist website, so the people who need it most can see it?

  28. 7/7
    Result: 100%

    Not very hard and, of interest, all the answers were ‘false’. The leaf question was a bit tricky and if it had asked about leaves *falling* in the winter (an adaptation to short cold days [presumably]) the answer would have been true. The color change is a result of the abscission layer cutting the leaf off nutrients and subsequent breakdown of chloroplasts that unmasks the other pigments.

    1. Which to me can be interpreted as a phenomenon resulting from the adaptation to form an abscission layer, thus a result of evolution…

  30. 7 out of 7!

    I never learned about evolution in school (didn’t learn much science at all for that matter.) Have had to learn on my own. Thanks to Jerry’s book on evolution and blogs like this.

  31. 7/7 with minimal background in biology (much more in astronomy and physics). Some are well-known from creationist evolution debates.

  32. “As living things evolve, they become more complex.” The author of the quiz regards this as false, but I believe it depends on the perspective. In any particular lineage, “as living things evolve” life may not become more complex. However, as “living things evolved”, life on earth became more complex than it was initially.

  33. If I’d answered correctly, I would have gotten 5/7 by their lights. They wanted the test-taker to say that the origin of life is not part of evolution, but that’s just not true. It’s a popular move (mostly by accommodationists)to argue to creationists that evolution is not about the origin of life, just about what happens to life after it originates, but that’s not the case. Evolution is about the history of life on earth, and its origin is a big part of that history. Now it is true that the people who study the origin of life are often different from those who study the later parts of evolutionary history, and that the expertise needed and the methods of study may differ, but it’s still evolution. Futuyma, Bergstrom and Dugatkin, and Herron and Freeman (three recent, comprehensive evolution texts) all have sections on the origin of life.

    They also wanted the test-taker to say that life does not evolve toward greater complexity. And if they’d added “necessarily”, it would be fine. But life has, and indeed must have, evolved greater complexity, because it begins at a left axis boundary of simplicity, and there’s only one way to go– up. Once you have metazoa, there’s indeed a lot of toing and froing along a complexity axis. Now perhaps they meant we (i.e. life on earth) could have stayed at a very low level of complexity indefinitely (which it did do for a long time), and this, I think, is indeed possible, but that’s a subtler and deeper approach than the test writer was getting at.

    The other 5 were all pretty straightforward.

    1. Greg:
      I think you are using an overbroad definition of evolution if you include abiogenesis (this is not to say that I disagree with including it in a book on evolution, since without the formation of small molecules, then nucleic acids/peptides/DNA-RNA, there would be no building blocks for the formation of life); but it’s difficult to see how natural selection could act on non-life. But this is your field, not mine.
      But I think you’re right about the complexity question. It’s all in how you read it: if you read it as I did, as “does evolution leads to organisms of greater complexity?”, then the answer is “no, not unless you qualify it somehow – there are clearly examples where evolution has led to loss of function and hence organisms of less complexity”; but if you read it as you did, as “does evolution lead to a global biome of greater complexity?”, then the answer is, as you said, unequivocally “yes”.

    4. I agree about the biogenesis-as-evolution question. How can the origin of life (presumably due to differential survival of replicators, of whatever identity) not constitute evolution?!

    5. I think replicating peptides counts as evolution, broadly construed. Once molecules start replicating themselves wth enough variation for some to leave more copies and some to leave fewer, we have evolution. Before that it’s (apparently) just whatever organic chemistry makes those replicators start going in the first place.

      Is abiogenesis that chemistry that kick-started the first self replicating molecules, and evolution everything that followed?

  34. Ecologist here. The leaf question was a bit silly. Of course, the annual change in color is not evolution happening in front of our eyes. But it’s the result of evolution, selecting for individuals that reallocate predious resources to their root system before detaching their leaves. So I only got 6/7. 🙁

      2. “Afterward, I remembered that some people do thing the changing of colors is evolution,”

        Just out of curiosity, where have you heard that?

  36. I’m a dentist with a BS in Zoology. However that was 40 years ago and I figure the education I had then is probably quite antiquated now. Guess I scored well by reading Jerry everyday.

  37. I got the one on leaves wrong as I thought they were asking if deciduousness is a product of evolution (not if the leaves turning brown was evolution occurring each Autumn/Fall).

    Is deciduousness a product of evolution? I presume so. What else could it be?

  38. I did not understand the explanation of the leaves one, which I got wrong. (Also missed the complex business.) But I am a very out-of-date physicist, not a biologist.

    1. They asked if the actual change from green to red/orange/yellow was evolution. Sure the adaptation to make the change presumably was, but when a leaf changes color it hasn’t evolved.

      1. Thanks, Mike. They also talk about five mechanisms for evolution. I can not find more than four. Anybody have a list? Maybe I should consult the College Outline Series. Or has that gone away too?

      2. Actual question (or “statement,” to be exact): “The leaves changing color in the fall is an example of evolution.”

        I think that’s ambiguous as hell and can be answered correctly with “yes” given that syntax.

        (And with “no,” if it would even occur to you to that someone thought you might be stupid enough to think each little leaf was evolving independently right then…)

        2. “I think that’s ambiguous as hell and can be answered correctly with “yes” given that syntax.”

          No matter how many times I read it I don’t find it to be ambiguous. To get it wrong you either have overthink it, and assume they are trying to trick you, or be completely ignorant, which obviously doesn’t apply to anyone here.

        3. I found the (correct) answer after a few seconds thought. Obviously the colour change is NOT evolution-in-action, since no evolution occurs in that short space of time except, possibly, bacteria. Also the leaves aren’t evolving, since they all end up dead.

          It’s the result of evolution, but then so are other changes like caterpillars metamorphosing or juvenile birds growing feathers or almost any age-related change in a living thing. Come to that, every living thing is the *result* of evolution. Again, not evolution as such.

          So I don’t think ‘yes’ is a possible answer, or you’d have to answer ‘yes’ about almost any feature of any living thing.

          cr

          1. Et tu?

            “…every living thing is the *result* of evolution.”

            Exactly! Which is why I ultimately couldn’t say no, because to me (as opposed to experts like you & Mike) it didn’t seem obvious that an implied “product of” or “result of” wasn’t possible given the wording, esp. for those of us who know that leaves don’t mate or reproduce asexually or have any other way of passing new traits down to offspring AND WHO DOESN’T KNOW THAT?*

            Now, if they’d said, “an example of evolution in action, that would have been less ambiguous. Or if they’d said that leaves changing color are evolving.

            *Although some plants do have leaves that will sprout new plants when they fall on the ground…but not a lot of people know that, either…

          2. I saw the question as confusing too. The leaves changing colour could be an example of how trees adapted to their environment. The only reason I got the answer right is I couldn’t think of when that example was used in illustrating evolution.

          3. I’m not an expert (or were you being sarcastic? I’m an expert in that)

            Thing is, since everything (almost) is the result of evolution, that would make the question about the leaves almost pointless.

            But I agree the wording could have been more explicit.

            cr

          4. Yes, of course I was being sarcastic. 😉

            It will be interesting to see, if jmorris949 lets us know when he’s made the revisions he speaks of, which questions he edits. (I felt Greg Meyer’s quibbles were also merit-worthy.)

  42. 7/7 for me too. On the ambiguous questions I think that I must have had a bit of an inkling about which answer was expected rather than which one was actually correct. I am an engineer who mainly deals with compressed air systems. I didn’t do biology at school but have read lots of books on all kinds of subjects since.

  43. 7/7, but I don’t feel too special, it was the bigger single group. About 37% of the total group of more than 3200 had that score when I took it. There were a couple of questions that I thought were marginally tricky, but fine as long as you directly answer the question as worded, rather than trying to second guess the questioner.

  44. Missed the leaves and the calendar question.
    I didn’t “overthunk it”, I “underthunk it”
    Not a college graduate, but have done lots of reading, esp. Sagan.

  45. 100%, but then I’m a retired biologist and would have been embarrassed with anything lower. Is Brandeis a religious university? It seemed the test was an effort to establish a subliminal association between “evolution” and “false”.

  46. I see a pattern here. I managed 7/7 through not overthinking. Greg’s dissection shows the subtleties that actually exist within some of these questions

    Still, not bad for an ex-chemist.

      1. I seem to be the only one who got confused by the last question. Damn it, you people are supposed to be freakish like me!

  51. 7/7 and yes there are at least two questions that are rather ambiguous. True/False questions are difficult to write.

  52. 100% here too. I am a graduate of Mohamed Noor’s on-line course Intro to Genetics and Evolution, so that helps. Wonderful course by the way, now offered somewhat continuously and self-paced.

  54. 6/7

    I missed the question about complexity. I thought life ranges from simple in the beginning to complex at a later time.

    1. Well, and in some senses it does–see Greg Mayer at #33 above. (Or Google to find Dawkins saying the same thing.)

      You’re just not supposed to think of increasing complexity as inevitable in all lines at all times because there are countless examples of “simplification” as well. (Think of many parasites, which can lose all sorts of functions and body parts when they no longer have to live freely on their own. Think of Sarah Palin…)

      A lot of terms about evolution have become “PC” over the years though it’s seldom admitted. Whatever you do, never say “primitive” or “advanced.”

  56. 6/7 I too broadly construed ‘natural selection’. Genetic drift and drifting or being blown from island to island or being demolished by a landslide and thus altering subsequent pairings are all ‘natural’ selection! I submit. But you know what we think of broad construing at this site.!

  57. 100%

    And that wouldn’t have happened before I started reading this website.

    Thanks, Dr. Coyne!

    1. Let me clarify my thanks.

      Thanks to Dr. Coyne and many of his commenters for educating me and thanks to Dr. Coyne for providing the forum.

  58. Engineer (retired). Currently beach bum* while this unrelenting hot fine weather keeps up in upside-down-land.

    7/7

    I noticed all the ‘correct’ answers were ‘false’, not that I relied on it.

    cr

    (* Oops, just looked it up. Cambridge definition (‘someone who spends most of his or her time having a good time on the ​beach’), NOT Urban Dictionary definition (‘An unemployed bum on welfare with no real education who makes extra cash by selling margaritas while naked at the beach. cf
    Lowlifes, hobos, losers, scumbags, beach bum’)

  59. The last question confused me. I think I had the scale backwards but this is a problem I have conceptualizing numbers not a reflection of how I understand evolution.

  60. I missed the last question!

    The last question should be:
    “Q: The correct answer to all questions in this quiz is “False”. (True or False)”

    Then, nobody would get 100% 😉

  61. 6/7.
    Engineer, not retired … got the leaves question wrong as a bunch of other people here.

  62. Scored 100%. Admittedly I had to think for a short while on two of the questions, but my training as a science educator and all those years spent teaching seem to have paid off.

  63. Wow 100% I’m impressed with me (ease up, I don’t get to say that very often). Question regarding complexity bugged me though.

  65. Got 100 but I taught microbiology at a community college, retired now. Some can get hung up,on the progress question.

  67. 7/7
    Result: 100%

    (Did the problem with browsers forgetting Name and Email address get fixed? Still happens to me on Firefox and IE.)

  68. 100% Full disclosure, I have a PhD in biology and my professional work was related to biology (muscle structure, function and disease). But since I’ve retired I’ve read a lot of genetics and evolution. The only question I paused over was the one about diversity. I’m pretty sure bacteria are more diverse than insects (each species of insects probably has a bunch of different bacteria that live with it, for one thing). But I knew for sure it wasn’t vertebrates!

  69. Too easy. It didn’t take long to realize that it was a “misconceptions about the evolutionary process” quiz. There should have been an “I’ll answer False for the remaining statements” button.

  70. 100%
    The scoring scheme is well messed up though.
    90-100 %4,127 people
    80-89% 3,559 people
    70-79% 2,240 people
    60-69% 0 people
    50-59% 1,148 people
    0-49% 547 people    The first group can only be 100% scores ; with less than 10 questions, it’s not possible to score anything else and be in this group. The same logic explains why the 60-69% category is empty.
    Bad experimental design.

    1. It’s probably built into the ‘write-your-own-quiz’ pre-formatted application that was used.

      cr

  71. I got 100%, and I manage a movie theater. So there.

    When I was in school, if you could convince the teacher that a question was badly worded, he or she would give you credit for it if your answer made sense. Everyone who missed the “leaves” question to complain to the guy who wrote it.

  74. I got 100% but had I thought longer I would have answered the leaves one differently. I remember reading (somewhere on the internet, I’m sure) that the leaves turn color because the trees draw minerals from the leaves before they drop. If that’s true then I could see how drawing these minerals could be an advantage over trees that didn’t if there was mineral scarcity.

  75. I was wrong on the leaves question. I admit I did not think too much before hitting the submit button because I tend to doubt myself and wonder if the question was framed in such a way that someone who was trying to promote disinformation would ask it to give a “gotcha” to use as “evidence” against evolution. That is no excuse for why I bombed the complexity one, but the question was worded in such a way that I felt it was a question that was not coming from an anti evolutionary view even though that should have been my warning. I overthought it on that one. Just happy that my zero science background led me here, and my daughter to making regionals at the science fair in spite of me… but with help from Dr. Coyne on her homework on science five years ago. Thank you again Dr. Coyne. She is aiming to improve her project and shooting for city next year. We both thank you.

  76. I also wondered about camouflage with the leaf question. Would there be a possibility that parasites would be detracted from some of the colors we see in fall leaves, as opposed to others. I was thinking about why some trees go yellow and some red and if there was more protection with one color over another.

  79. 7/7, thanks to WEIT, this website, and other books, plus my graduate degree in English for the leaves question (I saw that the question was about the action of changing) and my undergraduate degree in geology for the calendar question. And the Academy.

  80. 6/7 Missed the one on leaves, misunderstood the question. Thought it asking about the evolution of the fact that trees loose their leaves.

  82. Got 6/7, and I’m too ashamed to say which one I missed. Brain fart! I had no trouble with the ‘trickier’ ones some people here mulled/struggled over.

    1. Was it the last question? Come on, you misunderstood the direction the scale went too, right?

  83. If the question had been about *a tree*, rather than about *trees* it would have been a lot clearer. This is is type of question that I would have gotten wrong in college and then been incensed with my professor over when I understood the intent. Being older and wiser I got the intent despite the wording and ended up getting it right.

    1. As you will have noticed, question 4 (leaves) caused the most trouble. Why, I don’t know. Possibly adding ‘evolution in action’ to the end of the question would have made the distinction more obvious between evolution (process) and its effects.

      cr

  86. Here is more about the “quiz”. It’s not a real pop-quiz. I give it on the first day of class just to get students’ attention, to make them realize that they may carry around some common misconceptions. It’s not collected or graded. Again, here is the full story —
    http://blogs.brandeis.edu/sciencewhys/2015/08/28/a-false-start/

    The comments are spot on, but the “quiz” is supposed to be quick and simple, and in fact foster the kind of discussion that is happening right here in this thread.

    Thanks to everyone for their comments and insights. I will certainly modify some of the questions based on this lively discussion.

    1. Thanks for the link to the full story of how you use this “quiz” in class. What a brilliant idea. I really like how you found a way for students to confront misconceptions head on. I also loved reading some of your other posts at Science Whys. Keep up the great work.

  87. I got all questions right. I am 73 and a history major but have read all the major books on evolution and are in my bookcase. I have taken evolution courses online from Wesleyan(?) College, a free course several years ago and paid for the Harvard course on-line. Plus several books during last year!

  88. 100% for me but I’ve made a career out of learning and teaching this stuff.

    While I completely understand the confusion around the leaves question I wonder if that may actually be a strength. As jmorris949 points out, this can be used as a learning tool to stimulate thought and discussion rather than for assessment. In that case students could argue, as has been done here, under which interpretations the answer is true and under which it is false. Ultimately, everyone in the room would leave with a clearer understanding of evolution, no?

    1. You make a good point that I can illustrate from my own education. I once took a statistics class that was designed specifically for Anthro students. I was a TA at the time and several other TAs who shared office space also took the class. The professor had chosen a newly published book on the subject. Unbeknownst to all, the book was chock-full of errors, including in the solutions offered to problems at the end of the book.

      There is no better way to learn a subject than to be forced to figure out things that should, but don’t, makes sense!

  89. Thanks for all of your excellent suggestions. Here are some responses:
    – The tree question seems to have received the most attention. I agree that referring to a single tree, and adding “in action” would help, to read something like, “The leaves of a tree changing color in the fall is an example of evolution in action.” What do you think?
    – In terms of Gregory C. Mayer’s point, I agree that abiogenesis is part of the history of life on this planet, but the mechanisms by which we get life from non-life, and the mechanisms by which life evolves are very different from each other.
    – Responding to John O’Neall, the five mechanisms of evolution that I referred to are selection, genetic drift, mutation, migration (gene flow), and non-random mating. These all result in a change in allele and/or genotype frequency.
    – Several people brought up the question about complexity. There are many examples of character reversals in evolution (whales losing legs, cave-dwelling animals losing eyesight, island birds and insects losing the ability to fly), so evolution certainly takes a meandering path. The term “complexity” is also problematic – bacteria are much more metabolically diverse than mammals, but mammals have more nerve cells, so which is more complex? There is a great article on this subject by Sean Nee (The Great Chain of Being – http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7041/full/435429a.html) for those of you who are interested. There is certainly a time component to evolution, and a building on what comes before, so perhaps “layering” better describes evolution than “increasing complexity.” Thoughts?
    – I love George Bell’s suggestion (#60). What a funny idea.
    I would have chimed in much earlier, but I didn’t know the quiz was posted on this site and that this discussion was going on until recently. I only stumbled on the thread by accident.
    As I think you all know by now, the challenge I was trying to address is how to get students to confront misconceptions they might have. This is what I use the quiz for, as I mention here (http://blogs.brandeis.edu/sciencewhys/2015/08/28/a-false-start/). It’s not collected; it’s not graded. This should provide some much-needed context for a few of the comments above. Sometimes, in teaching, an ambiguous question is actually useful if it is brought up in class and the ambiguity discussed, as is the case for this “quiz.” Thank you Maria de Boef for pointing that out too.
    Thanks again for all your helpful and insightful comments, and to Jerry for posting the quiz. It’s been taken over 45,000 times as of this posting, which means there are many people thinking about and discussing evolution. That’s wonderful.
    Please be in touch with me if you have further suggestions for this quiz, thoughts on how to convey this material in an engaging and accessible manner, or other ideas for addressing evolutionary (and other) misconceptions.
    James Morris
    Professor of Biology
    Brandeis University
    jmorris@brandeis.edu
    http://blogs.brandeis.edu/sciencewhys

    1. Congratulations on creating an interesting teaching tool. I think it accomplishes the goal of stimulating thought and discussion. I agree, allowing a bit of ambiguity does force some extra thinking – that’s what education is all about.

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