Happy Tuesday! Our blog assignment for today is to go into detail to explain a recent project we have completed in Science. We introduced evolution by explaining the concept of natural selection. The project we did that taught us about natural selection was based on actual historical scientific research.

We were given a link to a website that had information pertaining to a study done by English scientists in the nineteenth century or 1800s. This was during the Industrial Revolution in England, when coal and oil productions were at a major high and unfortunately the air was full of pollution. We learned that this caused a subspecies of moth, the peppered moth, to be discolored. The process of natural selection that had been proposed by Darwin decades before was at action as it always is.

Chemicals in all of the pollution coming from the factories everywhere caused the moths' DNA to mutate. This turned their usually flaky wings a deep and dark color. The advantage helped them camouflage in darker environments such as forests that had also been polluted by chemicals. Since it helped them escape and hide from prey, the moths with this dominant mutation lived longer and could breed more. Therefore it was responsible for the growth of the species at the time. However, just because the mutated allele was dominant, it didn't mean all of the moths had it. Many moths turned out light or peppered, but they perished more quickly. In this way the situation was kind of like "survival of the fittest".

We also played a game on our devices on the webpage that allowed us to see what it would be like to have been a bird in a forest full of moths at the time. In a light forest, we could see the dark moths better and the lighter ones survived better, even though the figures changed. In the dark forest, the dark moths camouflaged and it was much easier to see and catch the light moths.

All in all, this lesson explains how environmental factors can alter populations and trigger the process of natural selection pretty well.

Happy Tuesday! Our blog assignment for today is to explain how limited resources can affect the process of evolution in any given setting. The truth is, this process is not triggered immediately by a small amount of resources and food, but instead it occurs by an evolutionary process called natural selection, or "survival of the fittest". 

If natural selection, which was first discovered in the 1800s by Charles Darwin, is to be believed, organisms that are most easily adaptable to their environments will last longer and face a lower risk of extinction. This relates to the limited resources concept because in a habitat where resources such as food, water, and shelter are scarce, organisms that can move, change, camouflage, or otherwise alter themselves to further fit in with their environments are bound to last longer and thrive. Whoever wins the "competition" for the natural resource can survive and prosper in their habitats for much longer than whoever loses can. Therefore, the environment itself can change them and they can evolve to fit into their environment even more than they did before until they are either completely ideal or evolve to match the climate's evolution. An organism's natural climate can be pretty hard on it. Organisms can also adapt and evolve to avoid other predators, who are really just fellow competitors in the competition for resources. Of course, natural selection can occur on a smaller scale -- in a "tough" environment, certain young will last longer and others may die. This happens to humans, too, though it's not always a result of the environment around us.

This fits in with our Science curriculum because we have just started a unit on evolution. All organisms evolve -- even people. At this moment bacteria are rapidly changing their forms and even larger animals and humans are changing. All evolution began when the first life forms sprouted up in the ocean billions of years ago. The evolutionary tree used the principle I explained above to fit into newer environments. Over time many sea organisms changed into land animals such as mammals and marsupials, some became small and grew wings (insects), some stayed aquatic, and some, like reptiles and amphibians, adapted themselves to both. Then came dinosaurs and eventually birds were born. Life forms, animals and plants alike, are still changing right now. How cool is that? This just shows that learning about the world around us and how it changes can be extremely interesting.

Our Science Solutions blog assignment for today was to reflect on a project we did a few weeks ago. The objective of the project was to further our understanding of genetics and DNA by creating a family of paper pets and flipping a coin to see the probability of inheritance. 

We all had to work with our partners and create our own families. The first thing we did was find out what the parents' traits would be. There were alleles and traits for body color (blue and yellow), eye shape (round and square), tooth shape (square and pointed), nose shape (triangle and round), and sex. Obviously, since one of the parents was male and the other was female, we didn't have to determine the gender for them.

As I stated above, we flipped a coin to find out what the genotype for a trait would be. For example, in mine and my partner's display, the father was blue while the mother was yellow. Heads stood for the first gene in the father's instructions ("B") and tails for the second "b"). This was the same for the mother. Since she was yellow, which was a recessive trait, she was homozygous and both of her alleles were "bb". However, since my partner and I had one yellow child, the father was heterozygous and carried the gene for a yellow body even if it was not encoded in his phenotype.

We flipped several coins; a few per each trait. Eventually, all of our children came out, each one different from the next. We got to pick names for our parents and then our children. We wrote down all of our information on one worksheet and used colored paper, pencils, scissors, and tape to represent the full family on a different one. Overall, what we learned here was that probability plays a big part in determining the genes of an offspring. The next thing that we learned which tied into this concept was Punnet squares. However, you should probably know that Mrs. Poole informed us that the way we were being taught about genetic probability was very much watered down from the real thing and human inheritance is much more complicated than a few paper pets.