DARWIN'S DANGEROUS IDEA: VIDEO, NOTES

Students, in this blog post you will find many important resources and updates to the syllabus.  In particular....Your last regular Unit Test has been rescheduled for Friday, May 13th.   There will be an After-School Study Session beginning at 3:15 and going until 5:00 on the prior date, Thursday, May 12th.

To help prepare for that Test, here is the latest set of  Lecture Notes, and here is the PDF file of the Lecture Guide based upon the notes.   The previous sections of notes to be covered appears here, and here.

Perhaps most importantly, here is the link to the previous blog post describing your 600-point final semester project  , which consists of writing multiple drafts of a guided essay.  The first draft was due on Friday, April 29th.   THE SECOND DRAFT IS DUE WEDNESDAY, May 11th!

Finally, the title of the latest group of notes, incidentally, is taken from the Daniel Dennett book which also inspired a two-hour episode of the NOVA 'Evolution' series.    This episode is being shown in class in its entirety over the course of several lessons, and students may eventually be asked complete a Study Guide based on this program. 

To help students master this material,   the entire video has been made available through this YouTube channel, broken into 11 segments, shown below:

(For your convenience, I have embedded all 11 videos on this page, but these may not be visible on FUSD computers or on others that do not have recent versions of Java to run flash-based media.  If you are unable to open the individual videos on this post, go to the link above and watch them directly on YouTube)

Chapter 1. Prologue
Chapter 2. Common Ancestry









Chapter 3. Ecuador and the Tree of Life





Chapter 4. Natural Selection





Chapter 5. Mutation and HIV





Chapter 6. Complexity





Chapter 7. How The Eye Evolved





Chapter 8. God





Chapter 9. A Scientist Discusses Religion





Chapter 10. The Human Question





Chapter 11. Humans and The Tree of Life Chapter 12. Epilogue




Finally, here is the PBS web site that accompanies the entire series.
 
You can also watch parts of the videos there, but they are lower in resolution.

VIDEO: EXTINCTION!

Monday and Tuesday's classes featured excerpts from 'Extinction!', which isNOVA's 'Evolution' series (2001). The video begins with paleontologist Peter Ward hunting for Permian fossils in South Africa's Karoo Desert, and relates ecological pyramids (which are like a 'house of cards') to mass extinctions, which are believed to be rare but important events in the history of life. It then follows the work of American Museum of Natural History researcher Michael Novacek in building the fossil record of small, shrew-like mammals from the Mesozoic, representative of the lineage that will survive the next mass extinction (the K/T event), which will claim the dinosaurs.
Episode 3 from

It concludes with an examination of the role of human activity in accelerating the rate of extinction, with important attention to conservationists like Alan Rabinowitz.


Students have been given a worksheet based upon this video as homework, which is now due. I encourage students to watch the video in its entirety for themselves if there are points that they don't get in class. We simply do not have enough class time to review this, but I know many students will want to see the whole story again, either by going to Google Video or watching it here:

VIDEO: "CRACKING THE CODE OF LIFE"

A handout, "Cracking the Code of Life", was made available last week and is on the class syllabus.   It was due last Friday.

The video viewed in class, and thus the handout based on it, can be viewed on-line here:



There is an entire PBS-sponsored web site to accompany this program. 

VIDEO: "LIFE'S GREATEST MIRACLE"

Students were given a worksheet in class to accompany the PBS Nova program "Life's Greatest Miracle."  

This is helpful for understanding the special form of cell division called meiosis, and how the 'crossing-over' of chromosomes helps generate genetic variation.

You can watch it online here!

VIDEO: The DNA Double Helix Discovery

Students in class today were shown the video below, from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which describes the background of Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA's structure.  
This video compliments the 100-point assignment 'A Twist of Fate', based on a Time magazine article written by Michael Lemonick, written on the 50th anniversary of their discovery.  Lemonick's original article can be found here.

That assignment ("A Twist of Fate") has been adapted, with Mr. Lemonick's permission, to form the basis of a 5,000 word assignment in which students will evaluate the process of scientific discovery, and how Watson and Crick both collaborated and competed (!) with other scientists en route to unraveling 'the secret of life.'

That assignment ("A Twist of Fate") can be found as a PDF file HERE.

VIDEO: ENZYMES

Another video by AP Biology teacher Paul Anderson, this on the organic catalysts made of protein called ENZYMES.   Enzymes are stereospecific: they have a unique three-dimensional shape, and the active site of the enzyme is said to fit substrate molecules like a "lock" fits a "key".   When the substrate enters the active site, it places the molecules in just the right orientation that a chemical reaction becomes likely to occur.  

VIDEO: PROTEINS

Another video by AP Biology teacher Paul Anderson, this on the class of macromolecules called PROTEINS.   Proteins are made of sub-units called amino acids, which in turn are formed from atoms of C, H, O and N.   (A few amino acids also have side-chains made of sulfur.)

VIDEO: CARBOHYDRATES

Carbohydrates are carbon-based macromolecules based on C, H and O.  They are polar and readily dissolve in water.

A simple sugar by itself, like glucose, is termed a monosaccharide, and serves as a 'building block' (monomer) to build a larger chain of many molecules called a polymer. In the case of carbohydrates, the polymer made from many monosaccharides linked together by dehydration reactions is called a polysaccharide.

Examples of polysaccharides made of glucose include cellulose, glycogen and starch.   Each of these glucose polymers are biologically important. 

VIDEO: MONOMERS AND POLYMERS

In today's class, we talked about the difference between organic (based on carbon) and inorganic (based on some other element) molecules.   Life, of course, is based on organic molecules.

We explained that there are four major classes of carbon-based compounds used by living things:   carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids.

Each of these compounds is made of individual 'building blocks' called MONOMERS.   The monomers are linked together with covalent bonds to make large chains called POLYMERS, and the process of making polymers is referred to as POLYMERIZATION.

Here's a video from Bozeman Science, with animations, that gives some nice background on monomers and polymers:

VIDEO: "THE LIVES OF THE STARS"

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The following episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, 'The Lives of the Stars', forms the basis of a student homework assignment. Click on the icon below to play the video within the blog:

COSMIC VOYAGE!

Biology students will be viewing a 36-minute IMAX video in class on Monday, August 24th, and completing a worksheet based on part of the video. The film, 'Cosmic Voyage', was made in 1996 for the Smithsonian Institute and was clearly inspired by a classic science education film called 'Powers of Ten', originally produced in 1977 by the husband-and-wife team of Rae and Charles Eames.

'Cosmic Voyage' approaches the idea of using the metric system, which is based on powers of ten, to explore the question: "What is really large, and really small?" The film first zooms out from an acrobat's ring in St. Mark's Square in Venice, the place where Galileo first trained his telescope on the heavens.


Through 23 powers of ten, we leave first the Earth, then our solar system, then the Milky Way Galaxy behind, until we reach the limit of modern astronomy, where we can see images from about 13 billion years past.


Reversing course, the video then zooms in on drop of water in the Dutch town of Delft, where Antonie Van Leuuwenhoek first trained his early microscope to discover the hidden world of microbes.



As we zoom in on a paramecium, we penetrate its cell nucleus, then zoom in on a molecule of DNA.


Within that molecule is a carbon atom, and the world within that atom is mostly empty space! Within the atom, the atomic nucleus contains virtually all of an atom's mass, made of particles called protons and neutrons. These, in turn, are formed from even smaller particles called quarks.

The film continues with a discussion of the search for a fundamental theory in physics through the use of particle accelerators like Fermilab, along with an overview of the likely "recent" events that led to our sun, our solar system, the Earth and life itself.

Here, presented on YouTube, is the first segment (Chapter 1) of the film who wish to review the material or share it with others. As the narrator (Morgan Freeman) intones, 'we are all travelers on a voyage of discovery!' Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 can be assessed at YouTube directly or by clicking on the hyperlinks