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Terrible2s's picture

And then there were 3: the class before thanksgiving

As you may have read, we had 3 people in the class before thanksgiving. Although it may seem lonely we actually ended up having quite a lively conversation. We read an article about dominant sides in snails and snakes. Prof. Grob. has included a link in his posting--I urge you to read it, quite interesting! Basically, a certain species of snails tend to be either "right handed" or "left handed" or right dominant and left dominant. This characteristic determines breeding because mating is facilitated by the dominant side; therefore, righties mate with righties and lefties with lefties. The article went on to describe a certain species of snakes which consume this certain species of snail. They also have a dominant mandible, either right or left, and this mandible only allows them to eat snails who have the same side dominant.

We drew many conclusions from the article. The biggest point we discussed was the possibility of "handedness" in other mammals and humans. By the article's definition, handedness describes asymmetry, and we explored the posibility of asymetry in other creatures. Humans for example were called asymmetrical because our hearts are located on our left side not our right (we also discussed a rare condition in which all human organs are in reverse horizontal order and the effects).

Lastly, we discussed the effectiveness of holding a class in the manner that we did. As Proman and Pgrobs posted, we explored an "interesting thing" and the class ended up being just that. I thoroughly enjoyed the style and hope that maybe either we can use it for the next few classes.

 

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