Ch 1.4 Life is Complicated

Now that all that crap is out of the way, let’s kind of talk biology. This stuff is the dumbed down, introduction stuff that really doesn’t say much at all but just outlines all the other shit we’re going to talk about for the next bunch of pages. So what the hell makes something alive? A heartbeat? Cells? DNA? Who the hell knows? Science, that’s who. So we’re going to run through the basic fundamentals of life and in order to be considered alive, you (or whatever we’re looking at) has to have all of them. You don’t have one or more of them, tough shit, not alive (sorry viruses). So let’s do this is the least painful way possible: a list.

• Made of cells

Cells are the basic building blocks of life. You have to be at least one cell but can be trillions. When an organism consists of a shit ton of cells, typically they combine a bunch of them into a tissue, a bunch of tissues into an organ, and a bunch of organs into an organ system. All the organ systems make the final organism. 

• Use Material and Energy 

This is metabolism. Materials are the things that build life (Spoiler: you’re made of dinosaur shit) and energy is what powers it. That’s it for this one…

• Respond to the environment

By environment, we mean anything that isn’t the organism. This could be heat, light, sound, chemicals, a knife, whatever. You shiver when you’re cold to warm up, your pee changes colors when your body is low on water, pupils change size depending on how bright the light is, etc. I could go on but if you don’t get it by now, sorry. Those are all responses

• Grow and develop

Growing and developing are two different, albeit (BOOM! Got to use that word) similar, things. Growing simply means getting larger or increased in numbers. No real changes are happening, it's really just an increase in volume. Developing is the process of becoming more complex over time. A lot of times, development happens at the same time that growth is occurring but they don’t have to overlap. They just tend to do so.

• Reproduce

THE SEX! Or the NO SEX! Either way, life has to make more life. We like to talk about sexual reproduction when you have two parental cells combining to form the new individual but asexual reproduction is also a thing. In asexual reproduction you don’t bump uglies and you just have one parent making a genetically identical copy of itself. (NOTE: this is going to come up a bunch but when we throw “a” or “an” in front of a word in biology, it means without. So asexual literally means without sex.)

• Evolve

For right now, we can define evolution as “the change in a population over time” but that is a very simplified definition and we are definitely going to dive into it a hell of a lot more in a later chapter. 

• Ecological Impact

Another obvious-once-you-think-of-it characteristic is that life is going to affect the environment. Earlier it was said that life has to be able to respond to changes in the environment but in its response, life is going to change the environment. It could be by adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by exhaling, more moisture to the air when you sweat, whatever, but every life form will affect its environment. It’s impossible for life to exist entirely by itself.  

So there you go, all the requirements of life. With that, we’ve covered the basics of science, how we measure shit, the way we do what we do in science and lastly, why life is so fucking complicated. But this is the introduction to the show. Shit is about to get REAL. So in the words of Samuel L. Jackson, hold onto your butts.

Why Dogs are Scientifically Adorable as Hell

As I was perusing the internet recently, I came across all these articles talking about "puppy dog eyes" and why your dog can make that face that makes your heart melt and you end up sharing your pizza with your four-legged friend. I was curious so I hunted down the actual paper (authored by Juliane Kaminski, Bridget M. Waller, Rui Diogo, Adam Hartstone-Rose, and Anne M. Burrows) to read because you can never trust blogs (except for this one). Let's dive into it.

We all know dogs are awesome and better than cats (sorry cat people). Part of it is that dogs are so damn expressive and just love you no matter what. Cats on the other hand have resting bitch face and couldn't give two fucks about you (or so it seems). But why do dogs make people feel all warm and fuzzy and the feline fuckers don't? No clue, this post isn't about cat, its about dogs. More importantly, its about doggy eyebrows.  

Now, dogs and humans have had a solid 33,000 years to really solidify any relationship between the two species. As a result of this time, dogs have gotten really good at reading cues that humans give them, whether its pointing at something (I do this all the time with my foot when I drop food on the floor, the dog just goes to it) or even just looking in a direction. Furthermore, have you ever noticed that when your doggo can't figure something out, they look at you with that face and you have to go help them? Yea, wolves don't do that. So something magical has happened in that 33,000 years to really form a link between dogs and humans.

Enter oxytocin. Oxytocin is nicknamed the love hormone because it makes you feel really good and smushy when you see something cute. Its the same hormone that gets released when moms look at babies. Interestingly (weird word to type), the exact same process happens when humans look into the eyes of dogs AND when dogs lock gazes with humans. So when a human looks at a dog, they get happy and when a dog looks at a human, the dog gets happy. Then a loop starts where dog looks at human, human at dog, dog back at human, human back at dog, and all the while both are just falling deeper in love with each other. Additionally, humans love puppy-looking dogs. Floppy ears, big eyes, big ol noggins, those are all puppy traits and some of the most popular dogs (think Golden Retrievers) just look like over-sized puppies.

FANCY SCIENCE TIME: When an organism retains juvenile traits into adulthood, that organism is known as a paedomorph. Paedo- from the Greek meaning boy or child and -morph meaning shape or form. No one knows where morph came from..

Image from TAP

This is where the actual paper goes into a lot of detail about dog face anatomy and data collecting procedures, all of which I find to be pretty interesting but you may not so if you think that would be cool, I highly recommend checking out the actual paper (I think from now on, I'm going to abbreviate "the actual paper" as TAP). The results of some dog and wolf face dissections, as well as video recordings, led to the following conclusion: dogs have this magic muscle that wolves don't called the levator anguli oculi medialis, abbreviated LAOM. This magic muscle allows doggos to raise their inner eyebrows, resulting in an eyebrow shape that resembles that look you get right before you cry. But it gets better.

Humans get a lot of information from each other from eyebrow movements, even when you don't realize it. That's one of the hypotheses for why we still have eyebrows even though we've lost most of the rest of our body hair (at least some people...there are some hairy mother fuckers out there). Dogs, having this extra muscle that wolves don't, are able to have much more expressive faces than other critters, with eyebrows moving as much as Nathan Lane (for the older crowd) or Emilia Clarke (for the Millennials). 

Not only have we bred dogs together that led to the formation of a muscle that lets dogs make sad faces, when they lift their little eyebrows, it makes them look even more puppy-like (which we've already talked about the oxytocin cycle). Even better, it shows more of the whites of their eyes (FANCY SCIENCE TIME: whites of the eyes are known as sclera) and its been shown that the more sclera an organism has, the more humans like it. That's why googly eyes are so cute. 

Basically, to sum things up, dogs have a muscle that wolves and some other animals don't that let them make sad faces, which makes them look like puppies, and make their eyes more trusting. Even shorter of a summary:

Ch 1.3: The Scientific Method

The scientific method is garbage. That’s right, I said it. Learning that things are done in this perfect, organized, step-by-step method, and everyone on the fucking planet does it the exact same way is utter bullshit. That’s not how people solve problems. Well, it is how we do stuff but its not. We don’t do things in these pretty little stages that you were probably taught when you were still learning how to multiply. Intuitively people solve problems. Some do it better than others but as a species, our brain is our greatest ally in surviving. If we’re presented with a puzzling situation, we try to fix it. If you connect your charger to your phone one night and go to sleep, you expect it to charge through the night and be at one-hundred percent in the morning. If you wake up (probably oversleeping) and the phone is dead, you don’t assume it was some witch’s curse that did that, you check that shit out. Was the charger plugged into the phone? Was the charger plugged into the wall? Was the charging cable intact? Did the power go out last night? That’s the scientific method. 

So often, you see the scientific method broken into at least five different steps, sometimes many more. When you use phrases like “make careful observations,” “form a hypothesis,” “conduct an experiment,” “gather data,” and “draw conclusions,” it makes it seem like this drawn-out and formal process. In reality, “doing science” is much more straightforward than that. Using the cell phone analogy I described earlier, the hypothetical you conducted at least five different “rounds” of the scientific method. To really drive my point home (and increase the word count of this book,) I’ll prove it.

Round one:

Observation: My phone is about to die

Hypothesis: If I plug my phone in, then it's going to charge and be at one hundred percent by morning

Experiment: Plug the phone in

Gather Data: My phone is dead

Draw Conclusions: My phone did not charge

Round two:

Observation: My phone didn’t charge, even though I plugged it in

Hypothesis: Maybe my charger wasn’t fully plugged into my phone

Experiment: Check to make sure it was fully plugged in

Gather Data: Yup, was totally plugged in

Draw Conclusions: That's not the problem

Round three: 

Observation: My phone didn’t charge, even though it was fully plugged into the phone

Hypothesis: Maybe my charger wasn’t fully plugged into the wall

(This is where I got bored of this cycle but you get the point)

As you can see, there are at least five rounds of the scientific method that you easily conducted within a thirty second period and never once did you think, “Oh shit, I have to revise my hypothesis now that the previous experiment I conducted yielded negative results.” So it doesn’t really matter that some people have described it has having five steps, or seven steps, or twenty five; all that matters is that you carefully do what you do and are methodical about collecting your data. The “bigger” or “more important” the experiment, the more detail oriented you need to be. The phone charging thing wasn’t a big deal so you didn’t have to record data and all that crap, you just did. But if you were doing legitimate lab work, or you’re a doctor trying to treat a patient, you want to make sure you keep detailed records so you don’t blow the place up or accidentally kill someone. 

Here’s where I point out some stuff that to some, may seem like a contradiction to what I just finished describing. While for most people it won’t matter that you don’t know all the steps of the scientific method, there are some extremely important words and concepts that I need to cover. Most of them have to do with misconceptions people have or distinguishing between some VERY similar ideas that smart people like to (and sometimes need to) be very picky about how they’re used. 

First up is the difference between an observation, an inference, and a hypothesis. Before you get “a hypothesis is an educated guess” on me, shut the fuck up, no it’s not. That’s why I’m explaining it and you’re reading this. Observations should be easy to understand: its just noticing and/or describing things. They can be super detailed or as simple as looking at something weird and going “huh?” These observations can lead to inferences, which are you educated guesses. Inferences take the information you have (usually gained through observations) and takes it to the next logical place. Or they fill in the blank that may be missing. If I tell you the sun is shining and its July 4th, you may infer that its hot outside and people are stuffing their faces and blowing shit up. That’s because you’re a selfish American and you assumed I was talking about people in the United States. If I were talking about the Southern Hemisphere, the fourth of July is winter and they dont give a shit about when the United States decided they didnt want to be part of Britain. So I like to think of inferences as logical assumptions that should be true but that don’t have to be true. This brings us now to everyone’s favorite, the hypothesis. Please, for the love of all things good and true, stop thinking of it as an educated guess. You’re not fucking guessing when you’re forming a hypothesis. Well, I guess you are but it’s not just a guess. With a hypothesis, you’re taking all your observations, all your inferences, all the information you have and you’re proposing a solution. If you’re oddly attached to thinking that a hypothesis is a form of guess, you need to think of it as the absolutely best fucking guess you have ever made in your life. The other big thing about hypotheses (not a typo, that’s the plural) is you have to be able to test them out. Thats the point of experimentation. You propose the hypothesis, and they you try to prove it. Before I go on, there will be some people out there right now thinking (or saying aloud if they’re weird) “Wait, wait, wait. You don't try to prove a hypothesis, you try to disprove it...blah blah blah null hypothesis blah blah blah.” Whatever. This is basic high school biology. They’re right but I need you to have a basic understanding of what the hell I’m talking about. If you want to get more technical, maybe pick up an actual science book and not one that literally calls you a bastard in the title. 

Next distinction to be made is between control groups and experimental groups, which involves discussing variables. Hopefully you know what the word “varies” means because that’s what variables are; they are anything that can vary. Within experiments, we really have (or should have) three or four different types of variables: controlled, independent, dependent, and possibly confounding. With controls, you essentially try to standardize (or control…) these variables across all subjects so that they no effect on your experiment. All groups get the exact same amount of these variables so that everything is equal because eventually, the control group is going to be used to as a comparison to your experimental group. The control group and the experimental group are going to differ by a single variable, which is the one you’re testing and goes by the lovely name of the independent variable, although its street name is the manipulated variable. The point of your experiment is to determine the effects of the independent variable on another variable, which we call the dependent (or responding) variable. Lastly, confounding variables are bad; they’re variables that you should have controlled because they could have affected your experiment, but for whatever reason, you didn’t.

All this is best explained using an example and the easiest example is trying a new fertilizer on a plant’s growth. In order to see if this fancy new fertilizer works, you need to be able to compare the size of the plant that receives fertilizer with a plant that doesn’t get it. So you get two of the same plant (controlled variable one) and put them in the same sized pot (controlled variable two) with the same amount and type of soil (controlled variables three and four). You give the two potted plants the same amount of water (controlled variable five), light (controlled variable six), and expose them to the same temperature (controlled variable seven). At this point, we have to start calling the two plants different things, probably plant A and plant B, although it could be anything at all: control and experimental, 1 and 2, Jeff and Steve, Captain America and Ironman, the possibilities are endless. Whatever their names, we need to differentiate them because one is about to get the fertilizer (the independent variable) and the other won’t. So let's go with control and experimental since that’s what I’m trying to teach you. The control gets nothing more than we’ve already given it because we want it to be the baseline. The experimental plant gets the fertilizer and, very importantly, nothing else that the control plant doesn’t. By only changing this single variable, we can directly connect the fertilizer to any differences between the plants we observe. We hope to see a difference in growth when we compare the two plants so in this case, growth is the dependent variable because the amount of growth depends on the amount of fertilizer the plant receives. When it comes to tracking this data, we can categorize it as one of two types: quantitative or qualitative. Quantitative is commonly thought of as numbers and are things you can count, whether it's legitimately going one, two, three, etc or using a thermometer, speedometer, pedometer, cytometer, or any kind of -ometer. Qualitative on the other hand is more a descriptive form of data, things not able to be counted. Maybe the plant we’re testing has grown to be forty five centimeters (quantitative data) but the plants are spotted and droopy looking (qualitative data). As you can see, both forms are super important. At this point, I don’t feel like talking about confounding variables, so good luck with those. It’s time to move on to something else.

I'm Back Mother Fuckers!

This post is going to be short because I have shit to do but I'm BACK!

It was stupid of me to try to get this thing off the ground right as we got to the standardized testing time at school and then with the school year ending, something had to be forgotten. Sadly, it was the bastards. But now its summer and I'm doing lots to get ready to make this shit awesome. So expect more on the "book" front, more random blog posts, more everything.

But that's it for now. Expect a new post soon.