Timeline Mini-Reflection

   Overall, there have been many events in Earth's history, but there are 3 that clearly stand out. Firstly, one of the biggest event was the diversification of vascular plants. Scientist have been able to observe this because the many fossils they have found show that the more plants were around, but this also was shown with there being more oxygen in the air. This is one of the most important events because these plants caused the Earth to be more habitable and provide more suitable environments for new organisms. Another major event includes the "Cambrian Explosion," which occurred at the end of the Cambrian Era. In a short amount of time, the Earth diversified a lot because of this explosion because it caused the planet to be more suitable for some than others. This explosion is significant because it resulted in new species and wide diversity. Last but not least, the third most important event would be the arrival of primates. These groups of primates, overtime, evolved to form many species including ourselves. Without them, us, humans, would not roam this Earth, and the Earth would have looked very differently to how we know it today.

  Through this project, we were capable of visualizing the age of Earth more clearly. The timeline was  scaled to mimic the duration of billions of years. Thankfully, Earth's history is divided into eras, periods, and epochs. The eras at the beginning were very spaced out as the essentials were being created. As you got closer to modern times, the eras became smaller and smaller and denser with events and new species that changed the world. This was very shocking because we were able to realize that almost everything we know today seems to be only a split second of Earth's entire history. It also showed us how much humans in someway have impacted our Earth in just a few century, it was too small to even be drawn on the 10 meter long timeline!

    This then led me to think how much we have done in such a short amount of time. The first thing that comes up is, "is this okay to do?" Why have we been the only organisms to change the Earth so drastically in such a short amount of time and not especially in the right way. As much as we try to tell ourselves that we should stop changing the world, we still burn fossil fuels and litter our lands and ocean. As much as we depend on Earth, it seems we have have turned against it in order to have everything our way, not even thinking of the real consequences. By continuing like this, we will cause the Earth to change too much in too little time and that might lead to many disasters in the future. The timeline was a real eye opener to the problems we need to face in our modern society.

    With this fascinating project, I can not stop but have questions. The largest one is, how much longer will the planet last? Another question I have is will our actions lead to a new great extinction and will that cause the Earth, to once again, change completely and have new organisms that will be completely different than us? Even though I still have these questions, I feel that this group project has answered many others and has opened my eyes to many new things that I would have never thought about before.

On the Final Stretch

   Since my last 20 time blog post,  I have found out so far is that the plants grown with the higher light intensity have been growing faster than those grown with less light intensity. With this experiment, I have also learned a bit more about myself. I have discovered that I am quite interested in growing plants as a activity. Another thing I found about myself is that I tend to work best alone, though I already knew this, this lab just reinforced it.

   For various reasons, I have made many little tweaks to my experiment. The biggest decision I made was to change the test question from "Can one grow a plant, so that it grows bigger, without using any chemicals or GMO's?" to "Does a plant grown in better conditions bare larger vegetables?" because of the time constraints. I have also decided to not compare the weight of a vegetable from a store and mine. Instead, I chose to compare them between each other. Another change I might need to make is to compare the growth of the plants and their leaf size instead of the edible part. I have not experienced many setbacks this time.

For the next steps, I will be continuing to collect data as the plants are growing. I will also get ready to finalize my lab by unearthing them and comparing the plants. I will also need to write my conclusion, but I believe that I will do this very close to the due date, so that I can leave the plants growing for the maximum amount of time.

Unit 8 Reflection

  In unit 8, we learned about the evolution of populations as well as the constant changes that populations go through. The main themes that were taught throughout the unit included: evolution, the part variation has in evolution, the varying causes of change, why change occurs, natural selection (phenotypes included), what specific things evolve, and lastly, artificial selection. Throughout the unit, we used these themes to build on each other. We also demonstrated some of them through labs. An example of a lab includes Hunger Games Lab, which demonstrated how natural selection affected the population. By doing this, we could actually see how the phenotypes, through the genotypes that were passed done, looked more like those that were better adapted to the changing environment. This then led us into the learning of the different changes that can cause a population to separate and change, or just change all together. One of the most important concepts that was taught during the unit was how to know evolution has occurred. This can be done by vestigial structures or even fossils. Before you can learn this, you must first understand that evolution is the change of allele frequency in a population. In summary, through this unit, we were able to learn many different themes that are fundamental to biology, and we were able to understand these concept better through the many labs.

    

   After ending this lab, I would like to learn more about the ways that we can see that evolution occurred. I would like to learn more about the vestigial structures and the fossils. The biggest concept that I do not fully understand is natural selection. Why does natural selection act the ways it does, could it work any other way?

   During the past unit, we were given the ability to be more assertive and apply it to our everyday life. I have trying to do this by speaking for myself. I also try to insert my self in the group settings and contributing in it equally. Recently, we have been assigned to create a timeline in biology in groups of four. I have increased my assertiveness in the project by saying what I feel and also by equally distributing the work among my group members. In conclusion, I feel that I have increased my assertiveness over the past unit, and I plan to keep it this way.