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Ice floes, increasing with climate change.
The basic themes that will organize our learning this semester are the genomic diversity, the environment, and how they interact to generate and maintain what we know of organismal diversity. Look for these symbols (in the linked presentation) in slides and activities through the semester to help your understanding.
Our regular interactions will be augmented a bit by asking you for feedback or showing your understanding of a concept. We will use Google Forms for this; each day will have new links associated with that day's class.
If you want to meet with Dr. Wares during Student Hours, the Zoom link is HERE.
Your course iNaturalist Project page is HERE.
Mostly this page will be used for things that you may need that don't always fit elsewhere on the site.
Yudell-Taking-Race-out-of-human-genetics-2016.pdfThis paper is one resource we will start with - recognizing that our "phenotypes" are so multi-variate that single factors like skin color simply don't define much at all about a person, other traits segregate independently (we will learn what these words mean early in the class, if you haven't had any introduction to genetics and inheritance of traits). This means that "race" is a construct based on society and history, and in a class about biology our focus is on traits and how they interact with their environment and each other. Most of biology is a grand continuous distribution of how similar/distinct things are, and the word "population" is used in this paper to recognize that for studying organisms, we must first define the group of organisms that we will compare with other groups of organisms, and do so intelligently.
We will have opportunities for you to put the study of biology into practice this semester. One component I am working on involves using the phone app iNaturalist to record observations of life and it uses "machine learning" to quickly identify the likely organism you are looking at. Generally within a few days somebody in the broader community will check the ID on your observation, and if they agree with what you conclude that observation becomes "Research Grade" meaning that scientists may use it to track the movement of organisms and diversity at a location.
There are plenty of opportunities to discover new diversity around Athens, even around where you live. The photo at right is by Bakary Sanneh, a student in BIOL 1104 in Fall 2019. I'm trying to get the video up - this is after he rescued this beat-up looking goldfinch from the web of a non-native Jōro spider at Ben Burton Park!
You will work with iNaturalist for your Unit 1 Group Project and may continue to use it to learn more about the world around you!
cou041.pdfWe will read this experimental paper assessing spatial variation in tolerance to cold for our Unit 1 "primary literature" exercise in understanding how science is reported.
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