Here's a clear path to crafting a good research question for the claim that human activity is affecting evolution, tailored for a 17-year-old learner.
What makes a good research question
- Clarity and focus
- Testability and measurability
- Specific population, time frame, and context
- Ethical and feasible data collection
- Direct connection to the claim
How to apply these ideas to the claim
- Define the scope: Which human activities and which evolutionary outcomes? Examples: antibiotic resistance, pesticide resistance, urban wildlife adaptation, or changes in behavior due to domestication.
- Choose a population: a species or community you can feasibly study or model
- Choose a time frame: generations or decades; for school projects, consider timelines you can support with data or literature
- Decide on a dependent variable: what evolutionary change you will measure (allele or trait frequency, fitness, survival, reproduction)
- Decide on an independent variable: which human activity you will investigate
- Formulate the question clearly using a single focused prompt
Templates you can adapt
- How does [human activity] affect [evolutionary outcome] in [population] over [time frame]?
- What is the relationship between [human activity] and [genetic/phenotypic change] in [species] under [context]?
- Does exposure to [factor] caused by humans lead to rapid changes in [trait/allele] in [population]? Why or why not?
Example research questions to get you started
- How does urban light pollution drive changes in circadian-related traits and allele frequencies in urban bird populations over the last two decades?
- Does widespread pesticide use select for herbicide resistance in a local weed species over multiple growing seasons?
- Is there a measurable shift in body size of a fish species in a heavily fished river, consistent with fishing-induced selection, within 10-15 years?
- How has antibiotic usage in hospital environments shaped the evolution of antibiotic resistance in a local bacterial community in a hospital setting?
- Do domesticated animals show rapid evolutionary changes in behavior due to artificial selection compared with their wild relatives?
Tips for narrowing and improving your question
- Start broad, then narrow to a single population and a specific outcome.
- Ensure you can justify your data source or method to assess evolution (genetic data, museum records, published studies, experiments, or simulations).
- Check scope with your teacher to fit your project length and available resources.