Biology....

This semester I'm retaking biology and I'm taking archaeology - archaeology is the one class I wish I'd taken while I was at BYU-Idaho and didn't - I barely missed the required grade last year for biology to qualify for the nursing program so I'm redoing it in hopes of getting a higher grade. Last semester I had a female professor who had a god-complex - she thought she was god's gift to humanity and she had a very condescending attitude. I tend to learn better with male professors so I went with a guy this semester - he's different, instead of going over everything and blitzing through it he goes over just what you need to know in more detail - which I like. With my other professor unless you memorized the entire book, you couldn't pass her class because she tested on obscure minute facts and her test questions were all-or-nothing. With this teacher, his tests are short-answer essay (he figures we should actually know this stuff and not just guess) but he is more openminded as to what he'll accept, that and he encourages questions and doesn't insinuate that you're an idiot for not knowing. Which is much appreciated.

With that in mind - I have some questions and comments about what I've been learning. We were talking about DNA and how it's so clever because the bases practice high fidelity; guanine and cytosine are always together and adenine is always paired with thymine, except in RNA when adenine is with uracil - DNA stores genetic information for life but in viruses RNA is used. So genetically they're different.

Because we are carbon based we assume that all life is carbon based (which I think is rather egotistical but what can you do) - while there are other possibilities we would not associate it with life because we define life as being made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. But there are extremophiles in the thermal vents deep in the ocean that are different - I would love to do some  research on those and find out how and why they work and what other possibilities are there.

We were also talking about what science is and isn't - science is looking for natural explanations for natural observations, only nature can be investigated using scientific technologies - supernatural phenomena is outside the realm of science. Supernatural phenomena would include shadow people, ghosts, voodoo, astrology, God. In science, there is no absolute  - it's all theory. But these theories are large conceptual ideas with broad explanatory power that are supported by overwhelming amounts of evidence and are treated as factual but are open to change and new data.

We touched very briefly on the human genome project, the biosphere in Arizona, bog people and cold fusion - when I have time I would like to do further research on them and find out more.

In discussing macromolecules - carbohydrates, lipids, proteins and nucleic acids - we were talking about how your diet effects your neurological activity. And how a diet rich in saturated fats leads to coronary heart disease. Trans Fats are not natural and are a partially hydrogenated fat that doesn't provide any known benefit to human health. On food labels you'll sometimes see "zero grams of trans fat" but it doesn't mean zero, it means that they got it down low enough per serving that they could round down to zero - only "No Trans Fat" means no trans fat.

The nucleus is made up of protons and neutrons with electrons all around it - weight wise the protons and the neutrons equal each other and there's about the same number of electrons orbiting it. If the nucleus is at one end of the football stadium, the closest electron would be on the far side, if not farther - my question is, how does that work?

Pure oxygen in high levels is toxic and photosynthesis is fairly inefficient because while it can theoretically be 30%, it works at a 0.1-3% capacity - but it does a good job at that level so it doesn't really need to be any higher. From that, I started thinking about our brains - according to some articles I read we use a small part of our brain at any given time, the more complex the activity the more parts of our brain are involved but we use the entire thing. Another article I read said that people with brain trauma may have a bubble of dead brain tissue in the middle of their brains that affects working capacity but that they would still live normal lives even though less capacity is available - we use 10% capacity. Obviously 10% capacity works for us, just like 0.1-3% capacity does for photosynthesis but what if the capacity were higher - how would things be different?

We also talked about free radicals and how in peroxisomes they're involved in oxidation reactions, they remove hydrogen ions and are transformed into oxygen and they break down lipids and toxins. And then you have the anti oxidants who come along and clean up all the free radicals - basically free radicals rip molecules apart. My original question was is free radicals related to telomeres? I don't think so because telomeres do not contain genetic information, they're just the stuff at the end of your DNA that gets shorter as your DNA replicates and divides - telomeres help preserve your genes from eroding too much, but once they're gone aging and other mental problems arise. Telomerase helps in longevity, extending telomere's and has been found in cancer cells. If cancer cells are made up of cells that are growing and dividing without regulation, hence telomerase and is basically immortal and creates a tumor over time and if free radicals rip the molecules apart and anti oxidants take care of the free radicals - does that mean that cancer cells lack free radicals? I think so.

And we talked about thermodynamics - the first law is that energy can not be created or destroyed, it can only change forms and the second law is that as energy is converted from one form to another, some energy is lost to entropy and is then in an unusable form for humans, the entropy in the universe is always increasing. In archaeology we were talking about radiocarbon dating and how the half-life of an organism is the amount of carbon-14 atoms that are left after an organism has died and has started to decay - in roughly 5730 years half of the carbon-14 that was in the organism when it was alive will have changed into nitrogen-14 atoms - from this you can back track to find out how old something is, as long as its younger than 45,000 years old. The original question was can the same process you use in archaeology to find the half-life of an organism thats been dead for thousands of years be used to find the age of the planet/solar system/universe? Looked it up briefly and the answer is yes - there is a similar process. They've determined that through radiometric dating of heavy elements like uranium the solar system is 4.5 billion years old and the universe is 13.7 billion years old and the universe is expanding.

Couple comments - first of all that's a lot of birthdays. Second - of course the universe is expanding, entropy increases as energy is converted from one form to another. Third - it probably is conceivable that the universe is that old because even though it's outside the realm of science we know that God is the same today, yesterday and forever, in The Pearl of Great Price it talks about how God is "without beginning of days or end of years", how his works are without end and will never cease, "worlds without number have I created", "there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power. And there are many that now stand, and innumerable are they unto man; but all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them" - the scriptures even tell us how He did it - "we will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an earth whereon these may dwell", "and by the word of my power, have I created them." I think "the word" means priesthood in this context. The point is - God has rules he has to obey, otherwise he wouldn't be the same "yesterday, today and forever", he didn't created this world out of nothing - there were materials that he used and since He and his works are without end, the universe could be billions of years old, that makes complete sense. 

It also makes sense that way back in the day a eukaryotic cell ate a mitochondria and a chloroplast and life emerged - we had to start somewhere, God uses the material he has to work with, he can't just defy justice because then he couldn't grant mercy - all ends of the law must be fulfilled. Theodosius Dobzhamsky, a creationist from the early 1900's, said "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution", evolution accounts for the unity and diversity of life. To a certain degree, I believe in evolution - I believe that God used evolution to further his creative and divine purposes. What I do not believe in is life emerging out of nothing - while genetic mistakes happen all the time, DNA completely replicates itself every couple of hours and there are 6 Billion possibilities, roughly six mistakes occur every time replication happens - I do not believe that we are all genetic mistakes, that all 8.7 Million species on Earth are genetic mistakes and that we are all here by happen chance. And actually if you pay attention to what they're saying - they don't believe it either. From an evolutionary point of view you have the bacteria, archaea and eukarya - we came out of the eukarya after the mitochondria and chloroplast got eaten, life emerged. Completely plausible. But it begs the question: where did the bacteria, archaea and eukarya come from? From what I've learned thus far, their response - it just was. Oooookay. That makes absolutely no sense - I mean think about it. Out of nothing, which the laws of thermodynamics tells us isn't possible, life emerged. Right. Moving right along. I like to think of the creation as a ping-pong game - God told us he used materials and there was space available and maybe in the process of combining the materials a big bang was the result. Even though science can't explain God and is considered outside the realm, God explains science and together it makes sense. And fourth - I had a different professor would told us that if you find yourself in an abandoned mineshaft and there's green glowing water, you should probably leave because uranium is nearby.