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.