This unit was about organisms and how they are classified into evolutionary relationships. Organisms are classified based on their similarities and are named through the study of taxonomy. The largest taxonomic level is the domain, which consist of eukarya, archaea, and bacteria. Archaea live in the most extreme of environments and look very similar to bacteria, but are genetically unique. The kningdoms under Eukarya are the Animals, fungi, protista, and plantae. Their are many phylums under the kingdoms within eukarya, but they all fall under invertebrates or chordates. This refers to weather an organism has a backbone or not. We also learned about transitional organisms through the documentary our "Inner Fish". Transitional organisms such as Tiktaalik and Archeopteryx show how we have evolved over time and the evolutionary changes that have stayed with in our most recent days. All organisms can be shown to connect in a phylogenetic tree, which shows our evolution over time and the different nodes at which we interconnect.
One of the major projects done in the unit was the What on Earth Evolved project, I did my project on the yeast, and it helped me learn a lot about not just organism interdependence, but also to make a presentation and publicly speak. I had to research information about my organism but had not guidelines as to the critical information or how to present it, so this project forced to become independent and judge for myself what is important and what is not. Having created presentation in previous classes, I knew that it was important to only place the critical content on the board and to speak the rest of it since the audience will lose interest otherwise and will be waiting for the next slide. Using this tactic also forced me to memorize my content and truly understand my organism instead of reading of the slides and being an un-engaging speaker. This experience will help me in my TED talk since I will mainly be speaking and there will be few supplementary slides for the audience. It will teach me to be engaging and to understand my content rather than read from slides.
Blog Posts From This Unit:
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