AP Bio Guided Reading Chapter 1 Name ______

Chapter 1: Introduction: Themes in the Study of Life

This chapter is an introduction to the important concepts in biology as well as reviewing the scientific method and the nature of science. For some of you, this will be a review. For others, you may have forgotten a lot of this information and now is a good time to go back and reacquaint yourself with these very important basic concepts of biology.

Concept 1.1 The study of life reveals common themes.

1. What process drives the diversity and unity of life?

2. What is meant by emergent properties? Give an example in the living world.

3. What is the difference in reductionism and systems biology? Give advantages and an example of each.

4. How does the structure of a leaf correlate to its function?

5. Briefly describe the differences in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.

6. Differentiate between genes, gene expression, genome, and genomics.

7. What is the difference in the movement of energy and chemicals in the ecosystem?

8. We hear a lot about “climate change” these days. What is climate change?

Concept 1.2 The core theme: Evolution accounts for the unity and diversity of life

1. List the three domains of life and examples of organisms in the domians.

2. Give two examples that illustrate the concept that unity exists in the diversity of life.

3. What two main points were articulated in Darwin’s The Origin of Species?

4. What did Darwin propose as the mechanism of evolution? Why is “editing” an appropriate lmmetaphor for how this process acts on a population’s heritable variation?

5. Study Figure 1.17 in your text, which shows an evolutionary tree. What is indicated by each twig: What do the branch points represent? Where did the “common ancestor” of the Galapagos finches originate?

Concept 1.3 Scientists use two main forms of inquiry in their study of nature

1. Describe the two main forms of inquiry and give an example.

Discovery Science

Hypothesis-Based Science

2. Look at Figure 1:18. What form of inquiry was Jane Goodall engaged while she was observing chimpanzee behavior?

3. What is the difference in inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning?

4. What are two qualities of a hypothesis?

5. What is a controlled experiment?

Independent variable?

Dependent variable?

6. List three ways a theory differs from a hypothesis.

7. How does science differ from technology?