The purpose of Science of Biology is to help us interpret Life and it’s understanding of meaning. You get an appreciation and value the whole picture of what we live more if you understand life, and value the person who gives you life, within your own development.
The understanding of how living things work, and the concepts that go along with this whole picture of the Universe and our Planet and everything in it, is a conceptual whole of Evolving living organisms. To understand the levels of organization in the hierarchy of life and living systems from the perspective of the tiny molecules and systems of cells, through to the higher level of organization, gives you the full picture of why we are here. Understanding life, and the information we are providing, along with evolution, explains how we store energy, transmit information, about our own organized structures, so we can evolve more and make more of ourselves. This ability to do this is fundamental to appreciating life, the living of life, and our existence in our Universe, on our little blue planet we call Earth.
We exist as the homo sapiens, the biological organism that count on the environment supporting us. If that starts to break down for any reason, human existence is at risk.
The information we learn and transmit is about structures of proteins, of course being molecular in form, being the molecular workhorses of the cell. We learned that the nuclei acid DNA, is the molecule that is responsible for storing information. DNA does this by having a unique sequence of nucleotide base that corresponds through the triplet code to a unique sequence of amino acids that make up a particular protein. DNA replicates, and is transcribed by RNA and how the RNA is transmitted into a protein.
When you watch a development occur of an organism the DNA divides into two copies and then separates in an orderly fashion into two daughter cells that are produced into a particular cell that divides. This is called the process of “MITOSIS.” This process gets a complete complimenting of the original genetic information. You must remember there are different kinds of cell division, one that occurs when cells undergo sexual reproduction. When there is sexual reproduction this is called “Meiosis.” So In Meiosis, the movement of homologous chromosomes – the two copies of chromosomes inherited from parents, one from mother and one from father, – how the movement of these homologous chromosomes count for the way that certain traits are passed on from parents to offspring. This observation encouraged us to look at the Laws of Mendelian Genetics in honour of the monk who inferred his studies of “pea plants” over a 150 years ago. Mendelian genetic studies and the molecular genetic studies lead us to an appreciation of mutations and genetic re-combinations that are a constant. This gives us knowledge that the offspring genetics will never be exactly the same as parents. This information shows us the consequences of these variations and how it provides the substrate for “EVOLUTION BY NATURAL SELECTION.” The idea that was proposed by Charles Darwin in the middle of the 19th Century, has now become the most organized idea of biology.
Evolutionary Mechanisms look at how populations change within time not only through natural selection but also through random genetics and other factors that affect the relative proportions of alleles in what is considered the “gene pool” of any one population. Homo sapiens being the one population on earth, although diverse in it’s evolving hybrids.
The exploration of evolution information in biology has concluded that evolutionary mechanisms lead to speciation accounting for the diverse individuals, that have occurred over the vast amount of time that it has taken for organisms to diversify into systems, over our Evolutionary time of millions of years on Earth, our Mother Planet. We will make sense of this diversity of hybrids born into families. It really is just a modification of the original genetics on Earth that exist today, or that ever existed throughout time. This original genetic information was found in the first cell that we want to call a “living cell on Earth.” It came about in the primordial Earth.
Lets turn our attention to a different organizing evolving fact of development and homeostasis. “What does it take to be a multicellular organism?” It takes two things to be multicellular. It takes a single set of genes to be able to develop into a diverse set of cells. Each cell has a different characteristic, different function, and different positions in a complex organism. This requirement leads us to talk about the complexity of problems in development.
Multicellular organisms have to have a way to communicate for their various parts to coordinate activities such as the heart pumping and the kidney mechanics. These diverse parts which have diverse functions must maintain a favourable environment and a stable environment. This directs us to consider the issue of homeostasis on the level of molecular organization. This way to deal with different kinds of cells in the organism that must express different proteins at different times and in different places. The solution is not all genes in a particular cell’s genome are expressed all at the same time. There are mechanisms in place that regulate gene expression.
When discussing some important critical roles, proteins that serve transcription factors essentially acting like molecular keys that lock and unlock the expression, and how proteins are produced by the cell, packaged, and get sent to their proper destinations. How do cells talk to each other in such ways as to control and coordinate each other’s activities? It is called “cell signalling.” It is in the binding of signal molecules outside the cell, where protein receptors span the cell membrane, activating or deactivating proteins. Having the proteins “phosphorylated” then cascades proteins activated which in turn affects the way that the cell functions, and that turn the cells on and off functional cell proteins that do something for the cell, or perhaps by affecting transcription factors, which then affect the genes that the cells express.
So knowing that with this background, the gene expression and cell signalling examined in details, begs to question how a single cell can develop into a complex organism. In seeing a few basic processes of cell division, cell migration, and a bunch of morphogenetic processes which include cell migration, or the movement of cells, changes in cell shape, plus cell programmed death, which concludes that “these morphogenetic processes are responsible for the unfolding of a complex organism from a single cell.” Different factors regulate the processes at different times of development. It was seen that RNA messenger and proteins pack all this data into the fertilized zygote of the Mother. It is called cytoplasm determinants, or maternal determinants. Cytoplasm determinants control the very earliest phases of development with the developing individuals down genes only playing substantial roles sometimes in later development with gastrulating, in many organisms – where the switch on control occurs. It is known that signals from other cells and tissues play an essential role in determining a cell’s fate in developing organisms with diffusible positional signals, especially being important in establishing the complex three dimensional morphology of an organism. So how do multicellular organisms maintain themselves? It is called homeostasis. Recalling that the coordinated responses of effectors counteract perturbations of physiological systems through negative feedback, and in so doing, return physiological systems to some “optimal point.” Organisms have evolved sophisticated systems leading us to consider how hormones work, and how neurons work and how nervous systems work in humans, the homo – sapiens or biological evolved organism of our blue planet. These processes of “homeostasis” maintain, a favourable stable, internal environment visualized by Claude Bernard in the 19th Century. Bernard defined homeostasis, but had the inclusion of the “maintained external environment” for the organism and the defence of the inside of the organism, from the challenges from the outside. The human animal uses sensory systems to transduce physical information obtained from the outside world into physiological information in the form of “action potential” fired by neurons in the human brain, which controls the nervous system that is connected by pathways in our individual Central Nervous system. This is why we are considered molecular mechanisms that have the ability to move. We can change where we are in the physical world which is potentially the most important adaptation that homo sapiens have for improving their situation. This is the broad interpretation of our defense mechanisms that we as humans have of defending our external environments from injury or attack by disease or parasites. When you turn your attention to the immune system here is what we saw in our highly organized cell types and molecules acting in a highly organized coordinated fashion to achieve a common outcome. This is the outcome of identifying and eliminating agents that might compromise the integrity of the human being’s well being of the complex multicellular organism. Behaviour of those that wish to eliminate the creators of human kind, the highly elaborate adaptation for achieving the optimal brain, and the optimal physiology, in the optimal internal environment and optimal external environments. Looking at the human organism as cells and molecule chains does not discuss how we develop as our optimal brains, in our optimal internal environments, and our defended external environments. Behaviours are a highly organized elaborated development of the human organisms that evolved and Love each other. For the human this is the most important adaptation for improving the situation. We will talk about how humans develop in stratified societies with freedoms and the right to learn, and the right to express who we are, as it is so important to mature our societies.
Carolyn d Hogarth
just sees “Potentiality”