Survival of the Sickest: Jump into the Gene Pool

get it? man I am hilarious.

Anyways, chapter six of survival of the sickest focuses of the study of mutation and how the previous theories, that mutations were rare and random in time, was wrong. The truth about mutations is that it is constantly happening and will usually either have a harmful effect or no effect at all. In some rare cases, a random mutation will provide an advantage that will better the organisms chance to survive and thrive. This leads to natural selection which helps this mutation spread throughout a species, and boom, this is evolution.

This chapter also spoke of viruses and their ways of penetrating and getting into an animals system. A virus itself is not considered an animals though, because of it's inability to reproduce of their own. They actually have to find a "host cell" that it can use to multiply and then move into another cell.

To continue on this subject, the chapter discussed vaccines, and how we inject non-harmful viruses into our systems in order to scare away more dangerous viruses. At the beginning of this chapter,we are told of a the first man to discover a vaccine for a dangerous disease. Edward Jenner studied and found out that people contracted with cowpox were able to defend themselves from small pox. He decided to test this by exposing a few men to cowpox, in order to defend them from small pox. By doing this, he developed the first vaccine.

Lastly, Inherited traits were brought up. It brings up an old belief that off-springs inherit developed traits, and denies it. It your parent had something that they developed during their lifetime, that doesn't mean that you will be born with that trait.

This is quite an interesting book.

Atoms to Traits

1. Explain the significance of Mendel.
   Mendelnted by breeding different peas. He found obvious morphological differences such as tall versus short stems, wrinkled versus smooth seeds, and many more. His experiments
2. Draw the structure of DNA and who discovered this structure.
   discovered by James D. Watson
3. Explain each of the five examples of variations that occur to DNA and give an example of each.
   Point Mutation - a single base-pair change.
   Insertion - the insertion/addition of a base-pair sequence into a geneGene Copy Number - the duplication of entire genes by copying errors during cell division which can lead to differences between speciesDeletion - the absense of the sequences of base-pairsInversion - a chromosome rearrangment in which a segment of the chromosome is reversed end to end
4. What is evo-devo?
5. A category of evolutionary biology that concentrated on studying the effects of changes in important developmental genes and how they affect evolution. His experiments changed the general perception of heritable variants from ephemeral and blendable to discreet entities passed from parents to offspring, which are in fact presen
6. Make a connection between human migration and the mutation of lactose intolerance.
   In the past, most humans were lactose intolerant in adulthood, because they only needed the nourishment of milk in their childhood. At some point in time, a genetic mutation formed that allowed us to handle the proteins in milk and use it as nourishment in our adulthood. This happened as our ancestors traveled to Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and on. Later in time, we were forced into an issue where we were forced to consume milk. This is how the genetic mutation formed.

-.- so there is no race.

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Here is my response to this article.

Does Race Exists?

     Well does it? This is one question that applies to so many people. Well according to the article Does Race Exist, no it doesn't, well at least not for long.

     What does Race mean? Well today, we use race to classify each other based on looks. Some people have light skin, and some have dark. Some people have lower cheekbones, and some have higher ones. We classify each other by race because we thought that this was the only way to do it, but this article sheds some light on this topic. If you look at the genetics of each different "race," you will that looks have very little to do with how related or different they are. Instead of separating into races based on looks, geneticists can find out the relatedness of groups by looking at small variations in the DNA,know as polymorphisms. These polymorphisms are mostly neutral and do not directly affect any particular trait, but there are some polymorphisms in genes that can lead to genetic disease. In a perfect society, we would be able to use this method to genetically separate into groups. Sadly, we cannot do this. We have become too diverse and interbred to use this method.

    Both this article, Does Race Exist?, and the movie that we are watching in class, teach us that the relationships between man are much greater than just how they look and where they live. They both show us that the relationships lie within the blood. In the movie, The Journey of Man, blood is referred to as a "time machine." They tell us that we can look into the blood of different races to better our knowledge of where we all came from and how we got to where we are today. This article has very similar beliefs in that it says that humans are not simply separated by physical traits, but we can only see these connections through their DNA.

     After reading this article and watching this movie, I have decided that race does exist, but not in the way that we know it today. Race is actually based on our genetic make-up, because it is what's inside that counts.

Well.........

Thursday, October 17, 2013:

I took a test. I think i did fine. We will see.

For Standard 9/1

I am here to correct my latest quiz, the Hardy Weinberg equilibrium quiz.

After Graduation, you and 19 friends build a raft, sail to a deserted island, and start a new population, totally isolated from the world. Two of your friends carry (that is, are heterozygous for) the recessive cf allele, which in homozygotes causes cystic fibrosis, Assuming that the frequency of this allele does not change as the population grows, what will be the instance of cystic fibrosis on your island?

Well at the time that I took this quiz, I was not too confident with my knowledge of the gene pool. 
So in this problem 2/20 people are heterozygous, which means that 2 out of the 40 alleles total that this group of people has, are recessive. In this problem, we are asked to find the instance of cystic fibrosis, or otherwise known as q^2.

So 2/40 is q.
So to find what q^2 is, we simple square 2/40.
so (0.05)^2 is equal to

0.0025.

When I first took this quiz, I was having trouble understanding this because my mind was aware of the fact that if a population has all homozygous dominant, except for two heterozygous, that you were able to say that 2 out of  these 40 alleles (2 per person) are recessive. As I was walking out of the Biology Classroom, this clicked in my head, but too late for it to make a difference in my quiz.

I reproduced in class today.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013:
Today was a fun class. A bit awkward, but fun. So, in an attempt to learn about recessive and dominant traits. We learned that homozygous dominant is when someone has AA or two dominant alleles. We also learned that homozygous recessive means that someone has aa or two recessive alleles. Then there are the Aa, or heterozygous. 

We then were taught the Hardy Weinberg Equilibrium. Basically, we used our first equation in this class, I think, p^2 + 2pq + q^2 to figure out the frequency that any of the above combinations would appear in a population.

We ended with one quiz, and were assigned another to take at home.

Shell and Brine....waggle

Wednesday, September 2, 2013:
Well today we finished a mini lab and then started a three day long lab.
So Mr. Quick started us on our mini-lab quickly. He threw a bag of assorted Croatian shells at us and asked that we split them into different categories. So my partner and I decided to split them up by their different looks.

In the end, we learned about adaption and how it is hereditary, but not always helpful.



Then we started our Brine Shrimp Lab, where we would observe Brine Shimp in different salt concentrations.