Tree of Life Project

The Tree of Life web project is a growing online collaborative project to:

to contain a page with pictures, text, and other information for every species and for each group of organisms, living or extinct.

direwolf — Direwolf distribution in the U.S. from Faunmap.

It’s a great starting point for looking at the tree of life because each page has links to a wealth of online resources. One of the links on the Mammalia page, for example, is to Faunmap, an online database that produces maps of where different modern and extinct mammalian species can be found in the United States.

All the pages on the Tree of Life website are linked by the branches of the tree of life. The Class Mammalia links up to its parent Therapsida and down to the its Orders such as Monotremata (one of my favorites) and Eutheria, the placenta mammals.

The site is authored by professional scientists and science educators so has that credibility. Most of the images also allow free, non-commercial use. Thanks to Anna C. for the link.

Censorship!

I spent an hour yesterday censoring Larry Gronick’s, “Cartoon History of the Universe“. I always feel a little dirty after doing it, but the section on the origins of life, particularly the comparison of the relative advantages of asexual and sexual reproduction, does go a little too far with the puns (in my opinion at least).

I do, however, like the book a lot, especially the section on the origin of the universe and history of life on the Earth throughout the Cambrian. I tend to use the bit up till the appearance of humans about 200,000 years ago. Despite being written in 1990 the information is still very accurate. The art is excellent and a pleasure to observe.

Of course, censoring tends only to increase students’ interests in finding out what was blacked out. Fortunately, there’s nothing in the Cartoon History that’s too terrible even if they should decipher it.

Timeline of life

This year the theme is life. My central organizing structure is the timeline of life on Earth. I plan to link all of the discussions of taxonomy, phylogeny and genetics to this timeline over the course of the year.

The timeline above will be the first lesson. As with these things the trick is deciding how much detail to keep in and how much to keep out.

What I like is that it gives the general overview of when important things happen while leaving a lot of space for students to investigate. Most of what we’ll be seeing this year happened in the Cambrian and this timeline conveys that this is a very small part of the whole history of life. In fact, it’s only when we cover the biochemistry of genetics that we will be talking about the origins of life.

earth_nucleobases — From the Exploring Earth's Origins website.

The website Exploring Life’s Origins has a great timeline. It also has some really neat sections, with very useful videos, on the formation of protocells and the origin of RNA on the early Earth that lead to life as we know it.

The Magnetic Field?

The one thing I left out that I’m still conflicted about is the Earth’s magnetic field. Recent research indicates it has been around since 3.2 billion years ago and its presence or absence may have had profound effects on life.

Having a magnetic field protects the Earth from the charged particles spewing out of the Sun, the solar wind. This makes life on land a lot easier since the solar wind’s particles are quite damaging to DNA. However, prior to the magnetic field forming all this damage to DNA may have also accelerated mutation and thus evolution.

Montessori Science Fiction

One of my favorite books that ties in with the study of the life sciences is Janet Kagan’s Mirable. It’s a series of stories about colonists trying establish themselves on a new world. Because of an accident on the trip over from Earth, the plants and animals they try bring with them (or propagate from their recorded DNA sequences) tend to randomly, and all too frequently, produce offspring that are hybrids of all sorts of phylogenetically unrelated organisms. The hybrids then produce other hybrids until, eventually, they produce another “Earth-authentic” species. This was supposed to be a feature to add redundancy to their gene banks. The impetus for the stories comes from the fact that some of the hybrids are unexpected and quite interesting, like the kangaroo-rex.

k-rex2 — M. A. Buss' model of the kangaroo-rex. Note the sharp pointy teeth and claws.

Kagan writes a good story, entertaining, light hearted and easily accessible to early adolescents, but I particularly like her model of education on the new world. Since they need as much genetic diversity as possible, even people who don’t want to raise children need to have them. So kids are sent to live at a boarding school that’s really a hotel, which they run. Sounds a lot like Montessori’s Erdkinder.

The kids get training and regular visits from experts in a variety of fields. They get to help of the protagonist with her projects by tracking animals in the field and running genetic sequences through their equivalent of GenBank.

The best science fiction provides interesting models of society. Mirable, I believe, is a model of a society designed around the ideas of Peace Education. The Montessori spirit runs throughout the stories not just in the education system, but in the way characters interact one another, even in times of conflict.

I’m an unabashed advocate for using science fiction in the classroom because it delves into such wide ranging parts of the curriculum, Natural World, Social World, Language and, in this case, Peace Education. Of course the stories have to be chosen well. Mirable is one of perhaps only two books (the other is The Chrysalids by John Wyndham) that I use when we study the life sciences.

Montessori Middle School Training/Research Projects

Maria Montessori developed her method teaching through careful observation of children and how they learn, which is why her method had held up so well over time and aligns so well with modern pedagogy (see Lillard, 2005). Montessori’s worked early childhood through elementary kids, and while she did some serious thinking and writing about secondary education, she did not put those thoughts into action herself.

Over the last 20 years or so Betsy Coe has developed, at School of the Woods, an exceptional middle school (and now high school) program based on Montessori’s ideas and tied to close observation of early adolescents and our growing understanding of their cognitive and neurological development. Unlike Montessori’s boarding school model (e.g. Hershey Montessori), Dr. Coe’s is primarily a day school but with “land-labs” one week out of every six, where student get to go out and live on the land.

There’s a lot to say about Dr. Coe’s program (which will be well explained in her upcoming book) but you can glean some of her influence from this blog, because I trained with her over the last two summers at the Houston Montessori Center.

One of the key tenets that Coe shares with Montessori is that the primary job of the teacher is to observe the students, their interactions and their environment. You apply the scientific process to the classroom. Observe, hypothesize, test and make the necessary changes. As such, a key part of the training program is the research project.

For the research project teachers in training have to apply the process to some aspect of their class and write it up. My own project was on the utility of my classroom wiki, which I’ve said a bit about previously. My peers did quite a wide variety of excellent projects, and I’ve asked them to share their experiences with me for the blog. I’m one of those people who’d collect bits of string because they might be useful in the future (hence the blog), so I’m loathe to let their experiences and efforts just disappear since it is unlikely that much of this work will be published.

I plan to post summaries of the research projects so there is a record of who did what, and I apologize for any mistakes I make in condensing the work. My goal is to create at least one node for discussion so that we might add these small anecdotes to the collective gestalt as we attempt to not replicate the interesting errors of others but make brand-new errors of our own.

Since most of this work is not formal research I’ll use the tag anecdotal research to help keep track of things.