Biology concepts – characteristics of life, cell theory, reproduction,
homeostasis, evolution
How
could this monster have come from the Walking Dead
TV
show? In what way is he/she walking, and while
she is in dire need of a makeover, can you consider her dead? |
In either case, they are moving and
eating and moaning, and generally disrupting the social order. So are they
forms of life? To answer the question, we first have to ask what it takes to be
considered alive. What characteristics of living things separate them from
non-living things?
Don’t laugh, it’s not always so easy
to tell if something is alive or not. There have been several different systems
for defining life, everything from mechanism,
which says life is just a special set of chemical reactions, to vitalism, which says life consists of a vital
force all its own and doesn’t obey the laws of physics.
Philosophers and scientists in history
have searched for a single attribute
definition of life – the one thing that separates all life from all
non-life, but it hasn’t been very successful. How about, “livings things die?”
Although it sounds sexy at first, this isn’t a very helpful definition.
Death is just an absence of life, so
wouldn’t you need to define life first? Anyway - living things can die, but that doesn’t mean they must die. There is a species of
jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii, which very well may be immortal. Most jellyfish start out as an immature polyp which
develops into a medusa (the bell shape with all the trailing filaments). Then
they get old and die.
This
is the medusa form of T. dohrnii. The
many hairs have
nematocysts to capture prey, while the red area contains
what
nervous tissue the animal has, as well as the digestive
system.
At any point in its life cycle, it can regress to its
infant
form (polyp) and then send out clones of itself and
grow
up again. It would be is if you and your parents were
the same age!
|
Think about the number of exceptions to
biologic rules we have discovered together in the past couple of years. Do you really think there can be
one attribute of living things to which there is no exception,
counter-example, or borderline case?
Some scientists say that we can't
define what constitutes life because, as of now, we are limited to knowing only life on
Earth. Life elsewhere may be completely different. But according to this line
of thinking, you could never define life, because you couldn’t ever know if you
had found every candidate in the universe.
For now, a list of characteristics
that living things all possess and non-living things do not is most
appropriate. Some folks use four characteristics, some five, six, seven or
eight. I tend to go with a seven characteristic set, because that’s the number
of items that most people are able to remember. You think it’s a coincidence that telephone numbers are seven digits?
Let’s take a look at the seven
characteristics and see how many are fulfilled by zombies.
Cells
– Living things are made of cell(s). This has been well discussed for
hundreds of years and we haven’t found any exceptions to this rule. In fact,
scientists have extended the idea of cells even further. Called the cell theory, the idea is that life is made of cells, the cell is the basic
unit of life, and all cells come from other cells. Anyone disagree?
The TED video series has a good video
about the weird history of the cell theory, including how Virchow’s
contribution was probably stolen from someone else.
Organization
– Livings things are organized at one or many levels. Even a single-celled
organism has organization. It has a membrane to keep it’s insides inside, and
everything else outside. This is organization. A bacterium has a single
(usually), large circular DNA on which is has coded all its genes. That’s
organization.
Multicellular organisms inherently
have more organization, since they have cells that must communicate with one
another and start to have specialization of function, but all cells must
transfer their hereditary material, and this requires great organization.
A new review has started to collate
the evidence that this complex organization extends to the nucleus-less
bacteria. It seems that bacterial RNA functions are sequestered in specific
parts of the cell. These spatial relations seem also to affect the functions of
the cell, so even at the lowest level of biologic organization, there seems to
be a lot going on.
Biologic organization moves from small
to big - cells, tissues, organs, organ systems, organisms. Bacteria jump
straight from cell to organism, but we can go further. We can start with
individuals and then move to populations, communities, ecosystems, and biomes.
Even single celled organisms participate in these levels of organization. How
about zombies?
Growth
and development – Living organisms increase in size and mass over their life cycle.
This may be subtle, like budding yeast producing small offspring that then grow
to become the same size as their parent.
Growth can take the form of hypertrophy, where existing cell(s)
become bigger, or hyperplasia, where
existing cells divide to become more cells. I leave it to you to decide which
one occurs in single-celled organisms.
Growth
and development includes the increase in cell number
as
an organism grows. But cell division isn’t uncontrolled. You go
from
1 cell to about 75 trillion, but there is also a lot of cell
death.
In the fetal state, if division was not accompanied by a
whole
lot of apoptosis (programmed cell death), a human
newborn would weigh over a ton!
|
That doesn’t mean that increasing cell
number is always bad in humans. It’s how we develop from kids to adults, how we
go from a single celled zygote to an infant. Do child zombies grow up to become
adult zombies? I haven’t seen enough zombie movies to render an intelligent
opinion.
Energy
– Living organisms acquire, store, transduce (change from one form to
another) and expend energy. Acquiring
energy comes in three primary forms – you gather energy from the sun
(photosynthesis), from chemicals (chemosynthesis), or from eating other living
things (hetertrophy). Zombies crave the flesh of other humans, so they are
heterotrophs, cannibals to be specific.
Using
energy means doing work – living things do work. Cells build and breakdown
molecules (metabolism) and use those molecules to do work – produce heat, move,
grow, sense and respond. Zombies move, although not very quickly. How slow must
you be to end up a zombie meal?
Response
– Living organisms have systems in place to maintain optimal growing
conditions for themselves, even as the conditions around them change. In
scientific terms, we call this homeostasis
(homeo = similar to, and stasis = stand still).
Remember in National Treasure when Jon
Voight said, “maintain the status quo.” That’s homeostasis in a nutshell.
However, the processes to accomplish this can be quite complex. Just think
about how many things must happen for you to try and stay cool in the heat or
stay warm in the cold. Shivering alone is a very complex process of mini-spasms
in your muscles.
A new study has begun to study how
your body weight is maintained whether you take in too many calories or
too few. Your set point weight will be maintained until too much change has
occurred over time and a new set point is established. This study found that
many organs are involved, and are controlled by the brain in the effort to
maintain a weight even when too much energy has been taken in. This neuronal
pathway may be a new way to manipulate weight gain and loss.
Reproduction – Reproduction
could mean a couple of different things. It could refer to the replication of
DNA in each cell, with the passing on of hereditary material to each of the
daughter cells.
In some organisms, replication and
reproduction (budding or binary fission) occur together. This is most often
asexual reproduction, but yeast are single-celled organisms that can exchange
some DNA in a sexual mode and then divide to produce two offspring.
Do you think zombie cells replicate
and form two daughter cells? If so they do a lousy job of it. Zombies looked so
decayed and lose so much tissue that I find it hard to believe that they are
replacing lost cells by mitosis. How about reproduction as defined by producing more
versions of the parent?
For many organisms, sexual
reproduction is how they produce more individuals of their species. Sexual
reproduction requires replication by mitosis in all cells of the organism, as
well as meiosis to produce gamete cells (sperms and ovum). I don’t know if
zombies undergo sexual reproduction – and I’m not going to ask.
This is definitely production, but
does it qualify under the definition of biologic
reproduction? Aren't you more changing an existing organism than producing a
new one? I think this is more about conjugation rather than reproduction (see picture).
Adaptation
– This means evolution. Nothing
stays the same in nature. Even organisms that have been around for millions of
years, like crocodiles and cockroaches, are always changing. Changing
environments, fluctuating numbers of predators, etc. are constantly putting
pressure on organisms. Mutations occur with or without changes around the
organism, but pressures make some of the mutations positive changes and some
negative changes. Those mutations that lead to more offspring and more
surviving offspring are kept – natural
selection, and over time there are many of these adaptations – evolution.
Remember, individuals do not evolve,
only populations. So you couldn’t see a zombie evolve, even if you chose to
stick around to watch – bad idea. But do zombies as a species evolve?
So how do zombies stack according to our
seven characteristics? Are they an exception or a borderline case? How about
other things – viruses, for instance. This is a common example for arguing
about what life is. How about flame? That’s an interesting discussion to have.
Next week, some aspects of zombies involve free will - do you think they want to eat brains? Are there other examples in nature where something can steal your free will?
Next week, some aspects of zombies involve free will - do you think they want to eat brains? Are there other examples in nature where something can steal your free will?
TedEd video (2013). The Wacky History of the Cell Theory TED
For more information or classroom activities, see:
Immortal
jellyfish –
Characteristics
of life –
This is great!
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