Bio 103, week 4

I also enjoyed last week's classes. From a visual perspective/as a visual artist, it was fun to look at life abstractly; to be able to see all these seemingly random, painted lines and colors and patterns, and then realizing the significance of the subject I was looking at (the earth, a bee's eye, an atom etc). Wouldn't you be surprised to, after admiring a blue and green abstract canvas, find out that you were looking at a photograph of the earth, or a close up of something else that was important to you (like part of your iris (eye) or something)? Okay maybe this is just an artist thing. I really like seeing.

More than anything though, thinking about scale and the breakdown of life in last week's classes made me return to an issue that haunted me for awhile. Our bodies are made up of all these other pieces (macro molecules, atoms) that constitute life--they compose us-- but the atoms that make us are not actually ours. The issue is attachment and the whole idea of durability... everything is temporary. So what does it mean to "own" something? Even your hand is not the hand you were born with-- the atoms have all been replaced with new ones over time. Does that throw anyone else off as much as it did me? I took a creative writing class in my last semester of high school for which I wrote a piece in the style of NPR's "This I Believe" series. I sent it along to Prof Grobstein and he said I should post it on Serendip... of course it has a personal story enmeshed in it, but the observations and questions I ask via the story I tell are relevant to the way we think in this class. It's a piece I'm proud of, and it means a lot to me, but I am happy to share it.

If you go to my blog, you will find it there.

I've been thinking about how this week's discussion applies to real life. Our look into classification could be a model for how we look at other issues outside of the classroom. For example, our decision of scale is extremely important; it dictates how similar two different objects/bodies will appear. If we look at living things at the scale of an angstrom, they all appear the same: a bunch of atoms... carbon, nitrogen, etc. If we look at living things from a great distance, say from the stratosphere, then the living beings we can see will again all look the same [for example, a human and a giraffe will both appear to us as a dot]. In the same way, outside of the classroom, if we examine an issue too closely we lose the context of the issue and practicality goes out of the window. If we examine an issue from too great a distance we tend to generalize and, once again, our observations are skewed and our conclusions potentially invalidated. There seems to be an important balance to be struck; our decision of scale proves a very important task. We must ask ourselves what exactly we are looking for and which scale will likely get us the "most right" obseravtions.

I've also been thinking about the idea of connectedness. It has been said in the classroom and in the forum that we are more related to bacteria than plants. Isn't this entirely dependent on what classification system you are using? For example, if I looked solely at the size of all three organisms (plants, bacteria, and humans) humans and plants would be more closely related than humans with bacteria. It all depends, again, on our decision of scale, on what we are looking for. Like everything, it is all relative.

Finally, I was glad we spent so much time on scale and space and the like. The size and complexity of our lives keeps me in constant amazement. I am particularly interested in the idea of following physical objects all the way "up" or "down." For example, we can follow humans all the way down through skin and bones and hair and muscle fibers and stomach acids and macromolecules and molecules all the way down to the carbon atoms that compose our bodies. But what is the atom made out of? Is our physicality an infinite regress? The idea is a bit tautological, maybe even elementary, but it holds my attention every time I think about physical space.

 I particularly enjoyed the discussion on the "Big Bang" theory on Friday. I feel like it's an abstract concept that everyone hears about, but it was interesting to put it into the context of our scientific method. (as in, here's the observations we have, what story could possibly explain these events?) However, I think it's interesting to note that there's just as much to be discovered at the smallest levels of life (inside and atom) and in the greatest scale of the entire universe. Also, the improbability of all of these things even existing is absolutely astounding. Everything is so incredibly complex, it's absolutely impossible to imagine how it all fits together. I love the idea of the tree of life, because it's a visual representation of the relationships between living organisms. Also, I think it's incredible how the classification system put in place much before evolutionary theory actually corresponds very well to evolutionary clads. 

 I'm curious about the notion that there could be life on earth still undiscovered due to our inability to see small organisms beyond a certain magnification. This raises important questions regarding our search for life on other planets. How are we supposed to find life if we don't really know what we're looking for? 

Given our discussion on the characteristics of life and how vast the universe is, I wonder what characteristics non Earth based life forms, assuming they exist, use to define life. What characteristics could they possibly use?

Visualizing our significance in relation to the other planets, stars, suns, galaxies, etc. out there is disorienting. They are to us as we are to extremely small organisms like bacteria. This reminds me of our discussion about how categories are human constructions that are subject to change and created for a purpose. The subjectivity in creating categories makes me wonder about how categorization might change in the future as technology progresses and we are able to discover more about life on Earth and other planets.

What stuck with me about today's discussion was one of the final comments, about how our relation to every living thing is much more evident when you look at it from a bigger perspective. When we look at the small area in which we live or even at our country, it is hard to relate ourselves to the simplest little organisms (like bacteria). From such a close view of life, all the species seem so different and distinctive. On the other hand, when you look at the Earth as a planet in the much larger universe, that may or may not contain other "life", we seem much more related to other living things. It is much easier to see a kinship to something we'd normally view as having no connection to us when we look at living things from a universal perspective. Again, its all relative, but living things are much easier (for me) to clump together and relate to when I look at our planet in perspective of the other planets and universe.