Hunger Games Final Analysis

1. In this lab, each person had to grab as much food as they could based on their phenotype and try to reproduce by the end of the round. This lab simulated the workings of evolution on a population. 

2. The phenotype which was best at capturing food was the pinchers, because of the fact that they could grab lots of food quickly with their opposable thumbs and index fingers. 

3. The population did evolve because the allele frequency changed. At the beginning, the frequency of the "a" allele was only 48%, but by the end, it had already reached 78%. See the graph below for intermediate changes and you will be able to see the rate of change better.

4. Some events in this lab that were random were the placement of the food, the amount needed to survive, the coin-flipping that would determine the offspring. Some things that were not random were the possibilities of the offspring and the methods that we used to pick up food. This affected the evolution because some rounds had way more deaths than others because of these arbitrary conditions. 

5. The results would definitely have been more different if the food was larger. The knucklers definitely and the pinchers perhaps would have a more difficult time picking up the food in between their little fingers. This can also happen in nature where changes in external conditions can be advantageous for some and disadvantageous for others. 

6. Yes, the results would definitely have been more different. Without incomplete dominance, there would be no knucklers, only pinchers and stumpys. This probably would have resulted in more stumpys initially as the homozygous genotype would still create a stumpy.

7. The relationship between natural selection and evolution is that natural selection acts on the favorable phenotype, allowing it to survive and reproduce better, and as natural selection occurs over longer periods of time, the population will gradually change to look more like these organisms with the favorable trait. This gradual change in a population over time is evolution. 

8. The stumpys, although not necessarily best suited for survival, were very good at strategizing and teaming up. In my opinion, it looked like they only mated with each other to produce "the superior stumpy race." This seemed to cause a bounce-back in the population of the stumpy, and I congratulate them for not dying out. 

9. In evolution, it is the population that evolves. Natural selection acts on the phenotype, as that is what directly affects the organism's ability to survive. To further elaborate, in the case of complete dominance, a homozygous dominant and a heterozygous will have the exact same phenotype, so their ability to survive will be pretty much equal. As you can see, the genotype is not the whole story in this case. 

10. I still have one burning question though: If evolution is by definition a change in allele frequency, then isn't evolution occurring every second (each time an organism dies, the allele frequency changes a bit) and not really a "gradual change over time?"