First Reading Post

The Cartoon History of the Universe by Larry Gonick is a priceless way to jump into the story of the history of life and evolution, I would encourge anyone that has not read it to do so. In reflection of this Cartoon graphic novel my professor has given us a set of questions to answers. These are them:

What hook does the author use to capture your attention?

The author Larry Gonick does a great job of hooking you with a statement that the widely held idea that life originated from an organic soup is actually false, pushing you to read on and find out what ideas or theory he himself has discovered to be true.

How could you adapt this hook in your own case study?

I could adapt this hook by researching first the original theory of the organic soup and how it came to be and then research and understand how it is proven to be unlikely and not accepted by the scientific world anymore, expressing the conflict of the two theories and the evidence for both theories.

Why was the Earth more radioactive four billion years ago?

The author shares that radioactivity has a particular rate of decay and that because we are not surrounded by unstable radioactive elements, that in fact the earth 4 billion years ago must have been much more radioactive. This is of course dependent on the knowledge of how the earth was created with the hydrogen bomb beginning.

What is remarkable about the fact that the oldest evidence for life is found in the oldest sedimentary rocks—that is, the oldest rocks that can possible contain fossils? (think about it; you may need to look up what sedimentary rocks are)

The remarkable thing about sedimentary rocks is that they hold a good timeline of the types of life present on the course of the evolutionary time line, and that the rocks themselves are mostly made up of the dead detritus (algae, plankton, ect.) that was once living itself built up and packed into rock over time trapping what lays between each layer.

The first mass extinction event in the History of Life was triggered by organisms who changed their environment so quickly, that they couldn’t survive in new environment that they created. Explain the circumstances of this extinction event. Over what time scale did it occur?

The first of the three major extinctions once again shows us how important it is that life adapts and changes over time, The Trilobites and the primitive lizards had not evolved with the rest of the organisms around them so their chances of getting food and receiving the things need to stay alive became available to them and so they all started to die off in great numbers.

What are some of the advantages of sex (from an evolutionary point of view)?

A few of the main advantages of sex are: It is the means in which organism can reproduce their species keeping their populations going, Another advantage occurring a little later in the evolutionary series of events is the selection of stronger and more robust genes, allowing the species to adapt and change in their environments at a much greater rate, and finally it can produce new types of species in the case of a genetic adaption or mutation.

What is a notochord? A notochord is a small rod designed to stiffen the body of an organism that runs along the inside of its central nerve.

One of the keys to evolution is that natural selection modifies features in an ancestor, adapting them to new functions. Explain this point using the evolution of the mammalian ear (see p. 23 of the reading). In the case of the Mammalian ear, we can see that in the series of evolution regarding the multi pieced jaw was adapted and change to one large jaw bone and little very small bones located right at the jaw socket or joint, it can be said that the reason why these bones did not completely disappear during adaption is because those bones act now as a key piece of the hearing and ear function of humans today. Highlighting the fact that evolutionary needs can change and evolve accordingly.

Describe three events that occurred in the history of life after the Devonian.

1) One of the events that took place after the Devonian period was the carboniferous stage, the Fish started to make their way up and out of the water to start becoming amphibians and bugs started to inhabit the forests, during the Devonian stage algae had made its way up and out of the water as well, laying the foundation for the forests to start covering the planet. Once there were amphibians on land evolution started taking leaps and bounds.

2) The second event was the Permian stage, it is at this stage that the amphibians start to adapt to land life, learning how to sun bath for body heat and then find shade when they needed to cool down, once this skill was mastered the lizards would start to eat much great amounts of food pushing their internal body heat up using their metabolism. These changes along with their teeth forming into more knives like ripping tools made way for the new kind of species a mammal.

3) The third event in line what the Triassic period, It was here that we start to see the first dinosaur like mammals, the species started to grow longer legs for chasing their pray and developing into very fast killing machines, the mammal grow in size and started dominating the land once filled only with smaller species.