Biology

Last week in biology we dissected a squid. It wasn?t a big squid like in Jules Verne, but just a little squid like in sushi. Next week we will dissect a snake; not a snake like in Jungle Book, but a snake like in "Robin Hood." Oh! Da Lally

Today in biology, we dissected a frog; totally gross, just like in seventh grade when we dissected a frog. We hope he was not Mr Toad. He didn't wear a vest and a bow tie, so probably he was not Mr Toad.

i doubt any of these animals were famous

Although, some celebrities could use a good brain-pithing!

yes indeed they do

Our frogs wore the latest in camouflage fatiques, dorsally green with black spots [like our fathers sometimes wear or like the airplanes they fly in] and ventrally a lighter green. Devilishly insouciant like Mr Toad.

hmm, did the frog arrive driving a car?
if not it probably wasn't coming from the infamous toad hall,
i think you're ok.

did you learn anything cool about frogs and squids?

lol i could do without biology, but i have to take it again next year.

This is our second time with the dissected frog. Probably the most interesting thing that we think we know about how frogs are different than squids is that squid's eyes develop from connective tissue and frog's eyes develop from nervous tissue. We think the seventh grade science teacher told us that when we dissected the frog three years ago. However, we haven't been able to google it, so maybe that's not true. To paraphrase Henry Fielding, it must not be true, we couldn't googled it. Could you?

We tutor a Downs student by playing Bingo with him. When we started he could count to thirty, and he could recognize that thirteen and thirty-one were not the same number. He was unable to do the same with anything greater than fourteen. Now he can recognize numbers up to one hundred ten. When he's tired and wants to stop, he says, "I done."

Let us say that when it comes to biology, we definitely done!

Biology has another interestng aspect in that people want to mix it with their religion.

Two hundred years ago, the two main ideas about species were spontaneous generation and biogenesis. With spontaneous generation, some organisms could come from inorganic sources, eels from an unknown source, salamanders from asbestos, etc. With biogenesis organisms only come from other organisms. Pasteur convinced the scientific community that spontaneous generation is mostly impossible, so today everybody accepts that biogenesis is the source of all organisms.

After Larmarck proposed that species change, the biogenetic group divided into the creationists and the evolutionists. Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who helped Darwin write the first scientific paper about natural selection, may have been the last creationist.

So at the beginning of the twentieth century, the evolutionists were split into at least four groups, represented by Lamarck, Spenser, Haeckel, and Darwin. Research in genetics by researchers like Thomas Hunt Morgan (Noble Prize 1933) and Herman J Muller (Nobel Prize 1946) convinced most folks that Darwin, when combined with Mendel, had the right idea.

So what does all this ado have to do with religion? Not much really, except that biogenesis is still a major rule (law, paradigm?) of biology, AND, biogenesis, while it's not a major thing in Christianity, it is important to some Christians who want to have it given more weight in school textbooks.

We think that maybe the previous posing (#10) didn't deal with the issue that some Christians have with biology. They have no objection to the biogenetic part of biology because biology and Christianity share that idea. The real objection that some Christians have with biology is the reintroduction of spontaneous generation.

Modern biologists believe that gases in the atmosphere such as carbon dioxide, ammonaia, hydrogen sulfide, and water might form into organic molectues such as lipids, proteins, neucleic acids, and carbohydrates. In the absense of fungus and bacteria to eat these organic molecules, they might form into a heterotrophic entity, maybe one should not call it an organism, that could feed on the organic molecules and make more of itself.

This is the part that modern creationists find so galling. They think it counterdicts their ideas about religion, and they call for the reintroduction of creationism into biology.

We don't know what use that textbook authors may make of the call for creationism, but we think somebody should point out that much of biology is still creationist. The notion of biogenesis is left over creationism. Before Lamarck, all biologists, (they call themselves naturalists), were creationists. Harvard even has a professorship, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, named after the son of their last creationist professor.

So creationism is still a part of biology. It has been modified, and now it's called evolution.