Unit 6 Review: Origins: Evolution and Creation, Side by Side

Lesson Goal

Bring the four Unit 6 lessons together, check which parts hold and which need a second read, and finish by writing out what was found and what each account claims, in the student's own words.

Side by Side, Not Blended

The review keeps the rule of the unit. Findings are stated as findings, and the claim about where living things and people came from is stated as a claim, with both accounts in their own words: common descent, and creation.

No question has a side for its right answer. The notebook work asks the student to say what each claims, and never which one to hold.

Key Concepts

Every question here is tied to one of the four lessons and the hint says which one, so a wrong answer is directions to the right page and not a mark against the student.

The key idea is the sort. A measurement and an interpretation can sit on the same page, and an honest student can tell them apart.

Where Students Get Stuck

🚨 Treating a finding as if it settled the origin question. A fossil in a layer is a finding. What it says about ancestors is the part the two accounts answer differently.

Treating natural selection and common descent as the same thing. The first has been watched, in the finches. The second is the claim about the distant past.

Key Vocabulary

Species

A group of living things that can breed together and have fertile young.

Population

A group of one species living in one area.

Variation

The differences between individuals of the same kind.

Natural selection

The process in which individuals with helpful variations survive and reproduce more, so those variations become more common.

Fossil

Any trace or remains of life from an earlier time.

Relative dating

Putting fossils in order by their layers: in undisturbed rock, lower layers are older.

Radioactive elements

Elements whose atoms change to a stable product at a steady rate, used to estimate an age.

Homologous structures

Body parts built on the same plan, like the bones in a human arm and a bat's wing.

Extinction

The dying out of a species, so that none are left alive.

Endangered species

A species with so few left that it is in danger of dying out.

Primates

The group of mammals that includes monkeys, apes and humans.

Hominids

In the textbook, humanlike primates that walk upright and have a bigger brain than other great apes.

Homo sapiens

The scientific name for modern humans, meaning wise human.