Unit 8 Review

     In this unit the biggest thing or theme we have learned was evaluation. For example, we learned about gene frequency which is the change of the amount of alleles in a population. Any change of the allele frequency means evaluation has taken place.

Where this picture came from

     Another big concept we learned was speciation. This is where one population is separated by geological means. That is one of many ways speciation can happen. The out come of speciation is potentially an entirely new animal all together that can not reproduce with its original animal.
     One of the last things we did was that we made a geological time line of the earth. We learned the scale and what happened during the earths creation. If you want more information on this please check out my other blog post Here.
      The only question I have for this unit is what did the first multicellular organism look like? I guess the scientist will find out eventually.

      In unit 7 our class worked on being assertive and continued this to this unit in group projects. You can view a video about this here. In the geological timeline of Earth our class practiced on how to be assertive. In my group I felt like the leader and carried my own weight as well as I told other people what to do kindly.

Geological Time Line Individual Reflection

      Recently in our class we have been working on a geological time line of the Earth's lifespan. And in this blog post I will tell you about the 3 most crucial events to take place on planet Earth (in my opinion).
      First is the Cretaceous period or the period where the dinosaurs went extinct. I believe this is one of he most important periods in the history of earth. The extinction of the dinosaurs showed us humans that a very powerful spices can still be completely destroyed due to random chance or just plain luck.
     Second is the Pleistocene age where the first human was believed to be created. This age shows that humans were once in the middle of the food chain and struggled for survival. And today we try and save other animals.
     The last Period of importance is the Proterozoic Eon where the first multicellular shows up on the earth. With out this Eon life as we know it would never happen.
     The scale of Earths time line is tremendous and humans only take up 200,000 years of the 4.6 billion years of earths time line and it is only growing. And we still manage to mess it all up in that short period of time. If we do not kill our self from climate change then something else will. It is only  matter of time.

Hunger Games Lab

     In this lab we tried to simulate evaluation or change in allele frequency. The "knucklers" did by far the best. I believe they did the best because they had the highest chance to reproduce at a 50% success rate compared to the measly 25% for the other species. The population evolved drastically. "A" alleles consistently had a lower population than the animals with "a" alleles. This is known as a change in allele frequency shown in the graph below. 

     In this lab there were elements that were random and not so random. One example of this lab being random is when we simulate having sex by flipping a coin to determine or offspring's traits. One thing that was not random was the species ability to survive and pick up food. If the food was really big or so big that the knucklers can not manage to pick it up would effect the population of the knucklers.  But if the food is smaller I do no think it would change the population in any way. The relationship between natural selection and evaluation is that in the end, the population evolves. Some people had pocket hoodies where a person would ware their hoodies backwards to have an easily accessible pocket to put their food in. 

     Evaluation weeds out the bad traits and gives opportunity to those that are able to survive and overcome the challenges of life. If it is just plan luck or strategizing on the best opportunity available to them. When evaluation takes place it evolves a population not one organism. This adds new alleles to the gene pool.

Bird Beak Conclusion

     In this lab we asked the question, if natural selection occurs in a population, how do changes in selective pressures affect the evaluation of that species? We found that the beak with the most versatility and convenience for the current situation will survive the longest. In our case it was the "tweezers beak" that survived the longest. Please refer to the part one graph.

The  "tweezers beak" is the second from the right

    In this part of the lab we experimented with different environmental situations that affected the survivability of our bird beak. Our environmental factor was that our ecosystem had a famine and instead of requiring 5 grains of food we needed 10 pieces of food to produce an offspring. Please refer to the graph. 

     Some possible errors would be that the food was not distributed evenly among us so other people had an unfair advantage over the other.  To fix this problem we could maybe count the amount of food in a specific area to evenly distribute it. We did this lab to demonstrate the process of natural selection and evaluation. Based on my experience from this lab I am able clearly understand evaluation.