KaiserScienceDec 3, 2024

As science teachers using NGSS, we don't just teach facts. We use storylines to connect facts into a larger picture. A fun way to get students interested in evolution can be to use clips from fun science fiction movies.

Many kids have seen the Tremors series of movies, featuring the fictional animal, Graboids. While fictional, we can ask - if they were real, how could they have evolved? With careful observation and Socratic questioning we inspire students to posit what form of life they could have evolved from - in doing so we cover natural selection, convergent evolution, and clades and phylogenies!

https://kaiserscience.wordpress.com/2018/06/29/graboids/

#evolution #NGSS #storylines #biology #graboids #tremors #clades #phylogenies
#biologyteachers #scienceteachers #highschoolscience

This unit addresses critical thinking skills in the Next Generation Science Standards, based on “A Framework for K-12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas” by the National Research Council of the National Academies

Graboids

In this lesson students view scenes from the Tremors series of movies. Students take notes on the animal’s biology: external anatomy, internal anatomy, lifecycle and behavior. We then use sci…

KaiserScience
Show threadgrimmigesFeb 7, 2024

PS If they only had a slightly invested #phylogeneticist at hand; they easily could have learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of their data and preferred tree (a Bayesian MRC, by the way, is a summary tree of various competing topologies sampled in the MCMC chain, not a phylogenetic tree)

Here's a quick #NeighbourNet based on their "toutes" matrix (inferred in less than a minute), annotated.
Overall #similarity makes #clades, surprise, surprise.

#PhyloNetworks #linguistics

AutisticMumTo3 She/herFeb 10, 2023
New Zika virus lineages show increased fitness
#ZikaVirus
#Zika
#PLOS
#NeglectedTropicalDiseases
#PhenitypicAdaptation
#Mosquito
#Mosquitos
#Mozzies
#Clades
#Mutations
#ZikaEpidemic https://www.news-medical.net/news/20230209/New-Zika-virus-lineages-show-increased-fitness.aspx
>The current study, published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, aimed to explore the possible phenotypic adaptation of the Zika virus to increase its transmissibility and virulence in the Americas.
New Zika virus lineages show increased fitness

The current study, published in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, aimed to explore the possible phenotypic adaptation of the Zika virus to increase its transmissibility and virulence in the Americas.

News-Medical.net
KaiserScienceDec 27, 2022

I got the opportunity to design my own High School curriculum on #Evolution; sharing it with you here

* Abiogenesis & spontaneous generation – the first (incorrect) ideas about this

* religious teachings about Creation

* #Abiogenesis – modern discoveries, scientific ideas

* Charles Darwin’s Voyage of Discovery

* Darwin’s finches

* Fossils: Evidence of evolution over time. Dating of #fossils

* Convergent evolution

* Homologous and analogous structures

* Natural selection

* Artificial selection

* clades & phylogenies

* Gradualism vs. Punctuated Equilibrium

* Is evolution a theory or a fact?

.
Examples of evolution
_________________________
* Chicken or the egg came first?! Seriously?

* Evolution of the dinosaurs

* Evolution of our kidneys

* Classifying groups of humans: #races, #clades, #populations (using words carefully and responsibly)

* Where did the idea of evolution develop? How has the idea changed over time?

https://kaiserscience.wordpress.com/biology-the-living-environment/evolution/

@edutooters

Evolution

KaiserScience