ibps-so 2020 · Question 159 of 351

In the given passage, there are blanks, each of which has been numbered. Against each five words are suggested, one of which fits the blank appropriately. Find out the appropriate word in each case. Scientists have long __(6)__ the incredible diversity within a species. But they thought it reflected evolutionary changes that unfolded imperceptibly, over millions of years. That __(7)__ between populations within a species was enforced, according to Ernst Mayr, the great evolutionary biologist of the 1940s, when a population was separated from the rest of the species by a mountain range or a desert, preventing breeding across the divide over geologic scales of time. Without the separation, gene flow was __(8)__. But as the separation persisted, the isolated population grew apart and speciation occurred. In the mid-1960s, the biologist Paul Ehrlich – author of The Population Bomb (1968) – and his Stanford University colleague Peter Raven challenged Mayr’s ideas about speciation. They had __(9)__ checkerspot butterflies living in the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve in California, and it soon became clear that they were not examining a single population. Through years of capturing, marking and then recapturing the butterflies, they were able to prove that within the population, spread over proximity. just 50 acres of suitable checkerspot habitat, there were three groups that rarely interacted __(10)__ their very close Among other ideas, Ehrlich and Raven argued in a now classic paper from 1969 that gene flow was not as __(11)__ and ubiquitous as Mayr and his cohort maintained, and thus evolutionary divergence between neighbouring groups in a population was probably common. They also __(12)__ that isolation and gene flow were less important to evolutionary divergence than natural selection (when factors such as mate choice, weather, disease or predation cause better-adapted individuals to survive and pass on their successful genetic traits). For example, Ehrlich and Raven __(13)__that, without the force of natural selection, an isolated population would remain unchanged and that, in other scenarios, natural selection could be __(14)__ enough to __(15)__ gene flow. Choose the most appropriate word.

1. AIn spite
2. BEven
3. CPerhaps
4. DDespiteCorrect
5. ENone of these