What the Hell is Science?
Before we get to biology (aka the dying and the sex) we first have to address the characteristics that are common to all forms of science. That’s what this chapter is all about: what makes science different from all the other subjects out there.Even the densest student has at least heard about the scientific method and the metric system. Now, they can’t tell you anything about either of them (some struggle to even tell you what the hell a meter measures--spoiler, it’s distance) but they at least know the words. And that’s a problem with a lot of people, they know the words but they have no clue what the fuck they mean. Take the word theory--if you really want to piss me off, tell me something in science is “just a theory.” When it happens in class, it makes me want to take my stapler and throw it at the person’s head. The word theory has been absolutely ruined by the general public, who think it’s just a guess. IT’S NOT A FUCKING GUESS. It’s as true as something can be. Gravity is a fucking theory. Go fall down a flight of stairs if it’s “just a theory” and let me know how you turn out.
So that’s something people don’t get: science is it’s own language and if you don’t know the language, it makes it difficult to understand. But on the flip side, that “language” is just something we apply to things we inherently do. Fundamentally, science doesn’t give a shit what we call it. We can say something is a theory, a fact, a guess, a marshmallow, a wonderflugg (I just made that up and I love it), or anything else and that doesn’t change what it actually is: a collection of protons, neutrons, and electrons (we’ll get to those in chapter two). So just keep that in mind as we go through everything. Science is innate, the words we use to describe them are just things (probably) old white men made up to make things simple for us to remember.
So if science is innate (which means natural if you lack a decent vocabulary and had no clue), what the hell is it and what does it do? Well, simply put, science aims to do a few things. First and foremost science is solely concerned with the natural world. Sorry all you ghost hunters and people with yetishes (yeti fetishes), those things aren’t real and that’s not science. Hundreds of years from now they might be considered science (it’s unlikely) but you never know. You’ve got to think about it, there was a point in time that there were only four elements: earth, wind, fire, and water (sorry, Captain Planet lied to you and heart isn’t one of them). We now know that is a bunch of crap and we have 118 elements. People once believed you became sick because you had bad blood, too much phlegm, or because you pissed someone off and they got the devil to do weird things to you but that all changed roughly two hundred years ago when the germ theory of disease was developed. So I like to think of it like this: everything we know in science can be followed by the phrase “as far as we know right now.” As new tools or instruments develop, science can change. And science will change. And that’s what make it so exciting.
One of the reasons that science can and will definitely change is that science is based entirely on evidence. Science doesn’t give a shit what you or anyone else thinks. You don’t believe in something? Great, science doesn’t care. You think Pluto should be a planet and not a dwarf planet? Who gives a shit? Pluto is a chunk of frozen rock flying around a giant ball of burning plasma and nothing more. So as more evidence comes in, science will have to change. You can’t ignore something just because it contradicts whatever you’ve already discovered or because it goes against what you expected to find. If you do ignore it, you’re a horrible scientist and probably a horrible person. As more and more evidence is collect, it strengthens an idea until that idea becomes ALMOST unarguably true. Science doesn’t like absolutes: so it tries to avoid words like “always” or “never” because there is almost always (see what I did there) an exception to everything. So it comes to a point where every piece of evidence says something and that something will probably will never change and when we reach that point, a theory is born.
That brings us to the last major thing that science can do: make predictions. But not just any predictions, like actual predictions that are based on the facts and evidence we just talked about and not on random-ass guessing. Because I can predict that this book is going to become a bestseller, become the first in a long line of “____ for Bastards” books, make me a shit-ton of money and allow me to disappear forever, but odds are, that's not going to happen. Science, on the other hand, actually has reasoning behind the predictions. Like if I stick a fork in an electrical outlet, I’m probably going to get the shit shocked out of me. That’s based on ALL the evidence of all the other geniuses who saw a fork, saw an electrical outlet, and thought that little face in the wall wanted a mouthful of metal. Or if the average global temperature keeps increasing, sea levels are going to rise and everyone who lives around the coast will have to become mermaids and mermen (which don’t exist).
Those three fundamental properties can be rolled into one basic sentence that explains nearly every branch of science that exists: using data based on evidence, science attempts to explain and predict events in the natural world. That's it. Nothing more. Deal with it.
The Metric Fucking System
But hold up, if science is nothing more than explaining and predicting the natural world, why do people have so much trouble understanding science? Probably because you’re assuming “people” to mean “inhabitants of the United States” and everyone here wants to be special and NOT use the metric system. Oh the metric system. Of the roughly 7,700,000,000 people alive in the world, 7,315,000,000 use it. Of the remaining 385,000,000 individuals, 327,000,000 live in the United States. Liberia and Myanmar (or Burma, I’ve never understood why it has two names) are the only other countries in the world that use the same stupid system we do. Think of it like this: if 95% of people did one thing, while the other 5% did something else, which group would you choose to be in? If you’re American, Liberian, or Burmese, you’d pick the 5% group. But let me put this piece of information in your face in case youre still skeptical. According to Planned Parenthood (this is where I formally cite where I get this statistic but you’d never actually check so trust me and if you dont, Google it) even though condoms have a 98% effectiveness at preventing pregnancy, realistically someone can expect an effectiveness of 85%. So its three times more likely for a baby to be conceived if a condom is the only preventative used than it is to pick a random human off the planet and for them to NOT use the metric system. But we still dont use it because whatever. ‘Merica, right?Lets do a little compare and contrast of the metric system and the imperial system (that’s what we use). We can start of easy, how many inches are in a foot? If you didnt say twelve, put this book down and go back to Green Eggs and Ham you savage. Next up, how many feet are in a mile? Please say 5,280. Ok, fun part: how many inches in a mile? The answer is 64,480 and if you were able to do that in your head, congratulations, you’re a liar. you just believed me before and didn’t fact check me, the real answer is 63,360. I promise I’m not lying this time. But seriously, how stupid of a number is 63,360? What’s even better is that we have sixteen ounces in a pound but eight ounces in a cup and a pound’s ounce and a cup’s ounce aren’t the same ounce. What the actual fuck? Meanwhile, the rest of the world is over there converting stuff easily because all they have to do is move the decimal point. And there aren’t a bunch of stupid words to remember because its just three standard units and then a few prefixes. So instead of remembering inch, foot, yard, mile, teaspoon, tablespoon, ounce, cup, quart, gallon, a different ounce, pound, and ton, you can just remember the three standards and realistically three or four prefixes. The units meter (m), gram (g), and liter (L), when combined with milli-, centi-, and kilo-, could get you by in just about every situation you would ever face as an average human. Its so straightforward, you should feel insulted that there are people out there who think we’re too dumb to be able to use it.
Breaking down those three metric prefixes is a very simple thing. Milli- has the same root as millennium, which is one thousand years (something I hope you already knew…), so whenever you throw milli- onto a standard unit, you have one-one thousandth of that amount. There are 1,000 millimeters (mm) in a meter, 1,000 milliliters (mL) in a liter, and 1 Vanilli is equal to 1,000 Milli Vanillis (I’m way too proud of that joke which only three of you will get). Centi- shares a root as century, or cent, and just like there are 100 years in a century or 100 cents in a dollar, there are 100 centi-whatever in 1 whatever. Connected milli- to centi- is as easy as multiplying by ten or dividing by ten, which is just moving the decimal point once place to the right or left, respectively. Ten millimeters is one centimeter, and 100 centimeters is one meter. Going the other direction, we get kilo-. All you drug users will recognize this prefix because when it's combined with gram, it's the main way to measure mass. So one kilogram is 1,000 grams, a kiloliter is 1,000 liters, and kilometer is 1,000 meters.
For all of us who are metrically challenged, I’ve got a few methods to quickly approximate metric units into our goofy ass imperial units. A kilogram is roughly 2 pounds. Actually, its closer to 2.2 pounds per kilogram but like I said, they’re approximations. A meter is just a little more than a yard (which is three feet, or thirty-six inches…) so it's close enough. If you want to approximate kilometers into miles, just think of a 5k. A 5k race is five kilometers, or 5,000 meters, and is roughly 3.1 miles. Something even cooler happens if you know what the Fibonacci sequence is, but I’m assuming you bastards have no clue what I’m talking about right now. The Fibonacci sequence is a math thing where the next number in the pattern is the sum of the previous two. It looks like this “1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, …” I bring this up because the FIbonacci sequence approximates the conversion from miles to kilometers. If you want to know how many kilometers are in ___ miles, it's the next number in the Fibonacci sequence. Like I said earlier, three miles is roughly five kilometers, but if you want to know how many kilometers are in twenty miles, you can look at the Fib sequence (I got tired of writing Fibonacci), see that twenty is basically twenty-one, which tells you there are just under thirty-four kilometers in twenty miles (I just looked it up and twenty miles is equal to thirty two kilometers). Lastly, one liter is roughly the same as one quart, or two bottles of water.
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.
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.
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