Today's final Science Solutions blog assignment is to compare and contrast sexual and asexual methods of reproduction. We are currently studying human reproduction and we have studied asexual reproduction in the past, so I think I have enough information to write this blog post.

Sexual reproduction occurs when two organisms use their sexual organs to reproduce and combine their genes to make a different organisms. Almost all animals do this, including humans. You inherited genes from your parents when they reproduced.

In asexual reproduction, one organism does all the work. Because their are no other genes to combine with theirs, the daughter organism is identical to the parent one since it has the same genes. Some very basic organisms reproduce this way, but humans are not basic enough to.

In organisms that reproduce sexually, there is much more genetic variation than in those who do not, obviously. Thanks to sexual reproduction, people are not all exactly the same! However, asexual and sexual reproduction do have certain things in common. For example, genetic information forms in a similar way in both. Here's a helpful diagram that should make these similarities and differences easier to understand.

Good Tuesday. Today's Science Solutions blog assignment is to hypothesize that by some astronomical chance, a hospital decides to hire us as a surgeon. Explain how the frog dissection we did last week in Science class might help us appreciate or prepare us for the job of a surgeon.

I only did the first part of last week's dissection, so I only got to cut through layers of the frog's flesh and muscles and see just part of its insides. This makes my knowledge limited, but I still think what I did helped me further appreciate what a surgeon does. 

The first thing I can think of off the top of my head is that it helped me realize even more that what a surgeon does is gross! Not only were the dead frogs creepy, they also didn't smell very good. Neither did their guts. It must take a lot of experience and not so much squeamishness to do what a surgeon gets paid to do.

The next obvious thing that would help me appreciate a surgeon's job was that I got experience with dissecting something and the procedures and steps of doing that. The anatomy of a frog is different from a person's, of course, but we share some organs, bones, and body parts with them. It was sort of like operating on a tiny, green, misshapen human. We got previews of all of the frog's body systems and their organ systems. The diagrams and drawings in our froguts.com packet helped us with that part of the dissection. When becoming a surgeon, I assume that students have to do a lab or labs like this in which they dissect a type of animal. It would be really scary to have a surgeon operating on you that had no experience dissecting things that weren't human, and it would be scary to be a surgeon assigned a task of operation on a person when I had no experience dissecting things at all. This is just what I think about things.