Christian Riley

Melissa Schaefer
Anthropology 1020
24 Sept. 2015
Natural Selection activity
Introduction
A. Darwin found 13 different species of Finches in the Galapagos, each species had their
own variations of beaks and variations in body sizes. He didnt think that these
Finches would be such a breakthrough in the theory of Natural Selection.
B. I. My hypothesis was that the hair clips would work best
II. I thought the hair clip would work the best because it had such a big opening and
could grab a lot at once but then I found out that we were only supposed to pick up one at a time
so after that I still thought that the hair clip would work best just because of how big the opening
was and how easily it could pick up seeds.
Materials and Methods
A. We used chopsticks, tongs, chip clips, hair clips, tweezers, binder clips and close pins.
B. What we did was everybody in the class got one of those materials and on the table
we had a little paper cup and a bunch of sunflower seeds spread thru out the table and
what we did was the teacher set a timer and we would try to pick up as many seeds as
we could one at a time and then when the timer went off we would count how many
we picked up and the three lowest scores had to stand up and get rid of their so called
beaks and they would get the beaks that the three winners have and the three winners
would get candy.
Results
A. Every material we used there were five of each spread thru out the class
B. Tongs and chip clips are the ones who did the best and chopsticks and binder clips
were the ones who did the worst.
C. At the end there was 11 tongs, 2 close pins, 0 chopsticks, 4 tweezers, 4 hair clips, 11
chip clips, 0 binder clips.
Conclusion
A. I reject my hypothesis
B. I reject it because hair clips did not do as well as I thought
C. I dropped a lot of seeds when I tried to pick them up, I wasnt that fast at picking
things up, I went at my own rate.
D. Because you put out a hypothesis and a conclusion and people can go and test your

activity and if they get the same results then the theory is right.
Discussion
A. Scientific method, you start with your hypothesis and then you do the test and make a
conclusion from it but you do multiple tests to make sure that it is correct. Scientific
method is used in almost every scenario you can think of.
B. It showed that the scientific method is a great way to test a subject and it is a great
way to either prove that you were right or to show you that you were wrong.
C. Theory of natural selection: Genetic change or changes in the frequency of certain
traits in populations die to different reproductive success between species.
D. This test showed that it does matter what your beak is like and the shape and how fast
and well that species will be able to pick up seeds and it shows that the more seeds
the species can pick up and eat the more populated that species will become and the
less seeds a species can pick up and eat the less the population will increase.
E. The way our hair is in a swirly pattern starting from the top and going down so that
water runs down our head better.
References
http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1642/0004-8038(2002)119%5B0864:ANPOTE%5D2.0.CO
%3B2
http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1676/09-035.1
https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=5QKGDQ9DpKYC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=published+literature+of+darwin
%27s+finches&ots=zKZVzvVKzj&sig=8q71tV4b_SXQvkj380uzKbX5uGg#v=onepage&q&f=f
alse