Science of Life: Projects and Principles for Beginning Biologists

Science of Life: Projects and Principles for Beginning Biologists — page 9
x THE SCIENCE OF LIFE ogy is the science of life and the process of studying all that is or once was living So how do you know if something is living especially if it is not an animal or if it is a newly discovered organism In this book many of the experiments require that you work with living things such as bacteria worms insects and even spiders You will see that while almost no single defini ion can describe what it is to be liv ing life is something that you as a biologist can measure and observe However something that is living can loosely be defin d as something that reacts to changes in its environment is capable of respiring a complicated word for breathing which includes forms of breathing not limited to the use of oxygen and is organic derived from or related to something living Biology sometimes has a different meaning to us in our every day lives Biology can also be thought of as the interaction of one self through all of one’s senses with any of the living or once-living things in our world in an attempt to gain insight into how they work Biology is both learning and experiencing the world in which we live Biology and its specimens takes on many forms some are obvious some not For example the piece of paper that this text is written on has its own biology It is made from wood pulp that came from a living tree Each page therefore has a history as a liv ing organism This page has a future biology as well One day per haps a hundred years from now this book may lie dormant in a landfill with other books that have grown very old In this landfill microorganisms tiny animals that cannot be seen with the unaided eye will begin to degrade the paper thereby obtaining nutrients so that they can divide and multiply into even more microorganisms This page will be transformed into part of a new living organism Biology encompasses many more organisms than just animals and plants In fact there are fi e kingdoms of life and this book is structured so that it includes information about organisms from each of these kingdoms A kingdom is the highest level of classifi cation in biology Organisms representative of the fi e kingdoms include the bacteria Prokaryotae plants Plantae animals Ani