YIF: Chapter 7

            In this chapter of Your Inner Fish, the author does a lot of explaining about the history and organisms with different types of bodies, organs, and the way they make their bodies. The author explained about the collagens and other molecular chemicals that are found in bodies organisms, and how even some primitive organisms, like sponge, have these. The author did not say too much about this and its evolutionary connection with humans, but he did write about how the in the timeline of the Earth that there weren’t bodied organisms until about 1 billion years ago. He said that when bodied organisms started to appear on the Earth that the life that Earth had was forever changed. This explains why humans and animals of all kinds are bodies, which was the point of the entire chapter. My favorite part of the chapter was the short story about the evolutionary experiment that was performed by Martin Boraas. In this experiment he let single cell alga organisms thrive in a controlled environment. After 1000 generations, he let a single celled creature with a flagellum into the environment where it thrived off eating the other organisms. After less than 200 generations the alga organisms evolved into an eight celled ball where each of the cells could get light to photosynthesize, and where it wouldn’t get eaten by the predator. This is my favorite part because it describes an experiment that shows that evolution of an organism is very possible and it supports the author’s belief of evolution. The Big Ideas of biology that are connected to some ideas that are present in this chapter are:  living systems store, retrieve, transmit and respond to information essential to life processes, biological systems utilize free energy and molecular building blocks to grow, to reproduce and to maintain dynamic homeostasis, and the process of evolution drives the diversity and unity of life. The first Big Idea has connection to this chapter, and it is that when the author was talking about the timeline of the bodied organisms he mentioned that the organisms might have become bodied in response to predators eating them, also that the sponges respond to the outside environment with the information around them. The second Big Idea’s connection to this chapter is that the single celled biological systems utilized the energy from oxygen and the sun to become bodied and then the homeostasis of the prey was stabilized. Lastly the third Big Idea’s connection to this chapter is that all bodied organisms are diverse but at the same time united by the fact that they are multicellular and certain cells have certain roles, and also that all the bodied organisms are bodied due to the change in the way of life and body-building. An essential question that can be made from this chapter would be, “How (chemically) does one cell evolve to become an organism with two trillion cells?”