Phylogeny is the evolutionary history of a species.

(a) The evolution of a species is dependent on changes in the genome of the species. Identify TWO mechanisms of genetic change, and explain how each affects genetic variation.

(b) Based on the data in the table below, draw a phylogenetic tree that reflects the evolutionary relationships of the organisms based on the differences in their cytochrome c amino-acid sequences and explain the relationships of the organisms. Based on the data, identify which organism is most closely related to the chicken and explain your choice.

(c) Describe TWO types of evidence—other than the comparison of proteins—that can be used to determine the phylogeny of organisms. Discuss one strength of each type of evidence you described.

My question is does the tree have to look like this:

Or could it look like this:

In my opinion the branching of the penguin and the chicken isn’t immediately apparent from the data table – are we supposed to assume that because they are birds it should look like one of the first two trees or would the third tree also be acceptable?

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Questions:

1. What school activities are you involved in or do you want to be involved in?

2. If you could be any historical figure throughout history, or any fictional character, who would you be and why?

3. What are you most interested in learning about in Biology this year, and what are you most dreading?

You will be departing soon for the wonderful world of college and I wanted to provide you with a few resources so you don’t get scurvy or some other disease caused by malnourishment (anyone remember the names of those diseases??? Bonus recipes if you do). Let me know what you think of them, and if you try them. Also if you have any tasty mods for the recipes go ahead and post them here!

Bon Appetit!
1 package ramen noodles
1 large egg
1/4 cup shredded cheese

Bring 1.5 cups of water to a boil and add the noodles. Cook for 3 minutes and reduce heat to low. (Reduce amount of water after noodles are cooked if you like a slightly drier texture) Add seasoning packet and stir to mix.
Crack egg into a bowl and whisk with a fork. Drizzle slowly into ramen noodle pot and after all the egg is added stir quickly to keep the egg separated (like if you were making egg drop soup). Egg should cook pretty quickly and once it is finished (no more runny egg to be seen) it’s done!

Add cheese and stir to mix. Season with fresh ground black pepper (regular pepper will work in a pinch but investing in a pepper grinder is a cheap and delicious way to add yummy flavor to any dish!)

Pour into a bowl and enjoy!

Variations:

If you want to add a few more things to your ramen that you might happen to have lying around the following work well (and are relatively inexpensive!)

- Rotisserie Chicken: I know the 7 dollar price tag seems steep but trust me if you shred one of those babies up and put it in a plastic container  you will get a minimum of 3-4 meals out of that (to share!). You can toss some of that bad boy in your ramen just before you add the egg and it will heat up nicely. Alternatively you could also buy canned chunk chicken.

- Cilantro or Green Onion: Do I need to explain the deliciousness? I didn’t think so. Add these to the water before the noodles.

- Soy sauce: I would recommend caution with this one though because soy is notoriously high in sodium (aka salt) and so is Ramen. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing if you catch my drift. Add to the pot after the noodles are cooked (along with the sesame oil if you are using it and the seasoning packet).

- Sesame Oil: A marginally pricey investment but you only need a few drops per use so it will last forever. My recommendation is to buy a tiny bottle of good oil (doesn’t have to be the most expensive bottle but don’t go bargin bin on this one). Make sure it is pure sesame oil (not a blend) and the darker version (Toasted) has the stronger flavor so I recommend it.

- Garlic: If you don’t have good knifes and cutting boards lying around (or don’t want to deal with mincing garlic) I would recommend buying one of the jars of pre-minced garlic from the grocery store. You can find them in the produce section, usually on a shelf somewhere (often below one of the freestanding produce displays). They are a couple of bucks but you will get many many uses out of them. Toss the garlic in with the water for the noodles at the very beginning and it will infuse the cooking water (and the noodles).

- Pandas: completely optional

Now there are a couple of points I want to make about this article

1. International students studying in the United States are most likely going to be highly internally motivated students to begin with
2. Not all American students are lazy across the board – however we are nationally trending towards this

I don’t bring this article to your attention to call you out individually but I wanted you to think about this as many of you will be going to college next year.

To relate it to a concept that may be more relatable to you – if you have ever worked in a restaurant there is generally a belief that young people are bad tippers. The American educational system is already regarded as the “bad tippers” of the international community (and by that I mean to say that many international people look down on American education because of situations like this and others – if you want to talk more about this come see me ha ha) and it will only get worse if your generation doesn’t decide to make this country the academic powerhouse that it used to be.

Here is the article after the jump: My Lazy American Students

baby Pangolin

Are you asleep? Exploring the mind’s twilight zone – life – 07 October 2009 – New Scientist.

For years scientists have had some ideas pretty firmly entrenched in the way we view sleep.

1) Sleep is for consolidating memories (but how many times have you stayed up all night studying and still scored fine on the test the next day? or on the flip side taken a 2 hour nap and forgotten it all?)

2) Sleep is a separate state of being than being awake. You are either one or the other.

New studies are showing that we might be blurring the lines more than we initially thought. Take for example, grogginess. These new studies are suggesting that grogginess is actually a blurred line between asleep and awake – the responsive portions of your brain are on-line but your memory recall centers are still down for maintenance.

Well you would be wrong. Cheating is not doing your own work, and claiming someone else’s work as your own. I know I have said many times that if I wanted a group lab report, essay, project, etc I would have asked for one but clearly my statements are falling on deaf ears.

Cheating is not tolerated in my classroom and when I catch you you WILL receive a zero for the assignment at best and a trip to your principal at worst.

One of your classmates said to me “Wow, you are the first teacher to notice” and seeing as how most of you are seniors I find that pathetic.

Plagiarism of any type, or cheating of any type is not and will not ever be acceptable in my class and I hope to NEVER see it again. I am very disappointed in those of you who chose incorrectly but hope that you will take this as a lesson learned.

I’m not a stickler about this because I’m a jerk –  but because this kind of behavior has serious consequences. In college being caught cheating has a penalty of permanent expulsion – if you don’t believe me read this article. Even if you think the punishment was severe for the crime, this could be you one day if you make the same mistake. In your job, cheating can get you fired… or sent to prison. Copyright infringement carries stiff fines and jail time, even if you didn’t mean to.

I hope this is the last time I have to speak about this, and I hope that you learn something from this experience.

Before Lucy came Ardi, new earliest hominid found

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID (AP) – 2 days ago

WASHINGTON — The story of humankind is reaching back another million years as scientists learn more about “Ardi,” a hominid who lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. The 110-pound, 4-foot female roamed forests a million years before the famous Lucy, long studied as the earliest skeleton of a human ancestor.

This older skeleton reverses the common wisdom of human evolution, said anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University.

Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, the new find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor — but each evolved and changed separately along the way.

“This is not that common ancestor, but it’s the closest we have ever been able to come,” said Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

The lines that evolved into modern humans and living apes probably shared an ancestor 6 million to 7 million years ago, White said in a telephone interview.

Read More Here

Most of you probably have heard there is this whole craze going on right now called Twilight. There are a bunch of vampires in this book who live forever. So it made me think… if you could live forever.. would you? Why don’t we live forever? What makes us age in the first place?

So that being said I thought we could do a little digging.

One of the first articles that I came across was this article in Science Daily about how the cleanup of proteins in your brain affect how long you live… wait… proteins? This sounds familiar to me. . . it actually sounds a lot like how most neural degeneration diseases work. Like Alzheimer’s.

Other scientists are claiming that it is telomere shrinking that is causing us to age and that if we can stop the telomere from shrinking we can stop the aging process. All in a handy pill form (Anti-Aging Pill Targets Telomeres at the Ends of Chromosomes). For a price of course.

Of course this isn’t the only idea on how to stop aging, just like the regular world the scientific world is apparently not immune to trends as well. This New York Times article discusses a variety of potential drugs that will hopefully delay the aging process.

Finally I came across an article that discusses what the author believes would be the end to age-related death (A Modest Proposal: How to Stop Aging Entirely). The author contends that we would have to also stop cancer and proposes a mechanism in which we could potentially do both.

Questions (include your sources!)

What does aging mean to you? How does this differ from the scientific view of aging?

Would you consider aging to be a disease? Do we fully understand what causes aging?

What are some of the potential negative sides of the idea of people not dying of age-related causes, and instead living essentially forever (until they get cancer or hit by a bus or something)? Give evidence.

And finally, back to the question that started this whole post – If you could live forever, would you?