Evolution, 4th Edition

EvoluTion And SoCiETy 599 Much of what is most meaningful to us is “perfectly useless”: music, sunsets, walking on a beach, base ...

SuMMARy ■■Evolution is a fact—a hypothesis that is so thor- oughly supported that it is extremely unlikely to be false. The theo ...

tigious scientific organization in the united States, the national Academy of Sciences, and the institute of Medicine of the nat ...

The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Ste- ven Pinker (Penguin Books, new york, 2002), is a well-written exposition and defense ...

Variation is the stuff of evolution. Darwin made the breakthrough discovery that natural selection cannot work without variation ...

A–2 APPENDIX Probability Distributions Physics tells us that all protons in the universe are identical. There is absolutely no u ...

A STATISTICS PRIMER A–3 Amsterdam. To calculate the mean of a set of measurements, we simply add them together and then divide t ...

A–4 APPENDIX Just what does a variance tell us? A variance equal to zero says that there is no spread around the mean: all the m ...

A STATISTICS PRIMER A–5 and female height shown in Figure A.2 differ by about 1.5 standard deviations. For some purposes, the st ...

A–6 APPENDIX variables (FIGURE A.6). We saw in Chapter 6 that regression is used to estimate selection gradients (see Fig ure 6. ...

A STATISTICS PRIMER A–7 rather than two: the distance between the point and the mean along PC1. The description is not perfect b ...

A–8 APPENDIX The larger a sample we have, the more confident we can be about the estimates we make about the population. This is ...

A STATISTICS PRIMER A–9 Statistics can quantify how certain we are that a difference between two sets of measurements represents ...

A–10 APPENDIX A final point is that it is critical to distinguish between statistical significance and biological significance. ...

A STATISTICS PRIMER A–11 where x! stands for x × (x – 1) ... 3 × 2 × 1. (This equation comes from the binomial distribution, whi ...

A–12 APPENDIX probability distribution, which says how likely we think different values are for the allele frequency at locus A ...

A STATISTICS PRIMER A–13 We compare the two likelihoods, and then use a probabilistic rule (see https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M ...

SUMMARY ■■A probability distribution describes the frequen- cies of different events or kinds of things. A distribution can be e ...

Glossary Most of the terms in this glossary appear at several or many places in the text of this book. Many terms that are used ...

G–2 GLOSSARY alternative splicing Splicing of different sets of exons from RNA transcripts to form mature transcripts that are t ...