Final answer:
William Smith's geological work demonstrated that fossils occurred in predictable groups within specific rock layers, which was a significant advancement in the field of evolutionary biology and helped establish the science of biostratigraphy.
Step-by-step explanation:
The main significance to evolutionary biology of the geological map and description of English stratigraphy produced by William Smith is b) It demonstrated that fossils occurred in predictable groups in characteristic rocks.
William Smith's groundbreaking work in the early 19th century led to the development of biostratigraphy, a branch of stratigraphy that uses fossils to determine the depositional environments and the relative ages of sediment layers. His observations that certain fossils were consistently found in the same rock layers across different locations allowed for more accurate predictions of rock and fossil types when digging canals. This contributed to the establishment of a more systematic and scientific approach to the study of the Earth's strata and provided evidence supporting the concept of an evolving Earth with changes occurring over geological time frames. The predictable nature of fossil layers also hinted at the existence of a temporal sequence in the appearance and disappearance of different species, which is a core tenet of evolutionary theory.