Bio 103 Week 4: Time, Diversity, and Evolution

While I was researching for my web paper I had a tough time choosing a topic. I realized that many of the topics I was interested in were very abstract, philosophical, or foreign and as a result difficult to talk about in concrete terms. That is partially why I like this class/Professor Grobstein's approach to science. He presents us with concepts that are hard to grasp and make us feel uncomfortable. But the idea of organizing a paper on an abstract idea was unmanageable. For example last week we were talking about the size, rate of expansion, and limit of the universe. This greatly interested me and seemed like a good topic for my web paper. Yet, the more I tried to think and talk about it the messier it got in my head. Discussing outer space in a logical fashion is onerous because it's outside our realm of understanding. The idea that space is continuously expanding is intangible; what is outside of space? What is it expanding into? Nothing? It seems to me that it is difficult for us to grasp not only because the universe functions on different spacial and temporal scales than we are used to thinking about, but also because the language we have is inadequate. We normally use the word "space" to talk about an area that is habitable, a particular place, of definable size. Even when we say that there is an empty space, it is not actually empty, there are trees, grass, a room, concrete...something. But "space," outerspace, is also the word that we use to describe the "space" outside the earth's atmosphere. And since the universe is expanding, what space is it expanding into? How can we even begin to talk about something that is so hard to grasp? If the answer, or one of the possible answers, is nothing how can we even begin to fathom that? How can there possibly be nothing if space, outerspace, is expanding into it? Perhaps the word "space" isn't even the right kind of word to apply to what is at the edge, if it has one, of the universe.

I thought lab this week was definitely interesting. The microscopes were a little frustrating to work with sometimes, but I thought it was cool to be getting so hands-on with something I don't actually know very much about. Yeah, I have some vague memories of cell structure from 9th grade bio, but not a whole lot. I think that made the discussion and reports to the class a little more genuine. We know and can recognize the difference between trees and grass, so the past two labs it was hard to "attack" people and come up with arguable ideas. But because we were actually trying to create knowledge for ourselves, I think the process of presenting and attacking was actually pretty genuine and helpful.

I was a little bit nervous when I came into lab on Thursday. Just looking at the microscopes brought back all these tedious memories of grid paper and tables and putting things into arbitrary categories (kind of like the movie "Office Space"). But first of all, looking at the cells was really interesting. Admittedly, a few looked just as I would have expected, but some, I put under the microscope and it was a bit like watching an iPod commercial, or that sensory-overload "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" movie from the 70s. I felt a little like Sal Paradise in On the Road: "And the word was: Wow!"

But what was even more interesting to me was what happened during our oral presentations. We were just kind of discussing things, asking and answering questions, and my lab partner almost offhandedly said, "Maybe cell size is in relation to their stages of development." Then each group seemed to come up with more great ideas as to what cell size could correlate with. I just thought it was so cool that the most interesting observations we made seemed to be stumbled on accidentally. 

ok that last line reads wrong- i meant to say that it doesn't seem to follow that being small means functioning less well or being able to do less.

I was happy to see that this week's lab posed a question that did not have a set answer to it. We, as scientists had the freedom to choose how to approach and test the prompt. We also had the liberty to make up stories for all of the observations made that day. This kind of thing not only leaves us with questions unanswered but with more questions to think about which I feel like is the most crucial difference between all labs I have ever done before entering college. The fact tthat here is an inifite number of possible "wrong" hypotheses and only one "right" one to answer life questions opens up doors to an infinite number of more hypotheses to question life.

 Like what others said, in the beginning of this week, it looked as if we were going to have some clear distinctions for once. The classification between autotrophs and heterotrophs seemed pretty clear and after all the confusions we went through; i was releived to see some clear distinctions and boundaries. However, with the example of fungi’s, again there proved to be exceptions to this way of grouping... 

Although, we are yet to find any clear cut definition for anything, i have learned a lot from this week. (especially from our lab Thursday). Posed with the question of does cell size have effect with the size of the organism, i thought there could be no possible connection between the two since organisms vary so greatly in size while cells are relativiely similar in their size. However, there seems to be somewhat of a connection between them since larger organisms tend to have more complicated cells and complicated cells tend to be larger in size than simpler ones.   

This story was strengthened by our lecture (?) on the prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Only single cell organisms (which are therefore much simpler and smaller) had prokaryote cells ( which do not have walls and are smaller)

 

Although there haven’t been any clear boundaries or distinctions about living organisms, I think I have learned a great deal about life and what composes them.

 

Andy

 

I agree with Sharhea, I thought this week's lab was a lot of fun. I was surprised by the fact that the size of the cell has no bearing on the size of the organism-I thought it would make at least a little bit of difference. I also found it interesting that within an organism cells not only varied in size but also in color. Biology is fascinating. Living organisms are so phenomenally complex-cells, as we discovered, vary not just because of one factor but because of many-complexity, development, function of the cell, age and history, environment, genetics...the fact that there are no rings on the trees (because cells stop growing in the winter, which makes the rings, and if there is no winter...) I thought was really interesting.
The more we study this, and the more I research my web paper, the more I understand how complex science is. There are no real right answers. Everything is interdependent, including all the information. I'm becoming more comfortable with the idea, though it was nice to have something that I could think of as definitive, but I guess I'll just have to let that go....

I thought it was intersting that, after our discussion on Friday, we "determined" that there is not random variation but rather nested clumps of diversity. Because there are so many similarities between organisms at different levels and scales, it seems like this would make sense. However, according to Darwins Theory of "survival of the fittest", shouldn't part of evolution be random variation? Along the way there must have been some sort of variation that allowed for certain organisms to be "fitter" and reproduce more successfully than others and therefore allow for their genes to be passed on. Maybe I am thinking about this the wrong way, but that was what puzzled me after class-there must of been some type of random variation.