Adaptive radiation is best illustrated by
- A. the two colour forms of the peppered moth
- B. the reduced human appendix
- C. Darwin's finches evolving different beak shapes from one ancestral species
- D. the similarity of cytochrome c in humans and chimpanzees
Explanation
Adaptive radiation is the spread of one ancestral species into many descendant species, each adapted to a different niche, which is exactly what happened when finches colonised the separate Galapagos islands. The peppered moth is a change in the frequency of two forms within a single species, not the origin of new ones. The appendix illustrates vestigial structures and cytochrome c illustrates molecular homology.
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