None of you thought it might be important to tell me that ferns have sperm that swim??? I just had to find all this out on my own?
And, (apparently, & no one thought to bring this up either🙄) fern plants are only one form... they have this 'other form' (tiny, ephemeral, difficult to find in the wild) alternates generations-- Fern spores don't grow into ferns! (WHAT) they grow into 'gemetophytes' (WHAT) THEN you get a fern.
@futurebird
Sorry. There's SO much weirdness in evolution that I hadn't thought to tell you even all the bits I happen to know.
Like for instance do you know about kidneys??? They are not the evolutionarily ancient structure I would have assumed. I naively thought that getting rid of metabolic waste would be a super-basic function, but that's land animal thinking. When your blood runs through gills, it's barely even a thing. So most phyla evolved some sort of kidney-like thing independently.
@futurebird
Kidneys evolved when bony fish colonized freshwater and were originally a way to get rid of excess water while holding onto valuable solutes. That we now use them to get rid of excess solutes while holding onto valuable water is just how evolution rolls.
@futurebird Also, in moss, the main body is the gameteophyte, and the sporophyte (the part we think of as the main plant in all vascular plants) is just a little stalk that grows on top of it!
This explains why my fern transplants (I love ferns and basically live in a river, so they’re the plants that grow best in the yard)seem to do nothing, then are suddenly really healthy a couple years later!
@futurebird I did my PhD on ferns (forty years ago). I'd have happily told you! You only had to ask!
Alternation of generations in plants is fascinating. In bracken - the fern I studied - the haploid gametophyte requires very different ecological conditions from the sporophyte, plant we're most familiar with.
In bracken, both generations are very easy to clone - basically you just cut them in half, and they'll carry on growing. Rather useful for experiments!
@futurebird I got an A+ in college botany because I have a horrifying imagination and would happily translate all of the plant concepts into human terms - enormous swimming sperm, plants creating guns out of their own bodies and launching newborn babies into other plants... It made it easier to remember.
@futurebird Yup! It’s called alternation of generations and was one of the most fun biology things we learned in high school in India: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternation_of_generations — I don’t think it’s correct to say that fern gametophytes are difficult to find in the wild, as my plant-obsessed wife finds them all the time! They look like this: https://flic.kr/p/TkJoMH
@futurebird jellyfish also have a similarly weird life cycle where they have a polyp phase
Also, unlike a lot of plants, cannabis exhibit sexual dimorphism too! Male and female plants, where the female ones make pistils and the male ones make pollen sacs, and there's the rare hermaphrodite plant that makes both.
@futurebird but then apparently female cannabis plants can go and grow pollen sacs at the end of their life cycle if they realize that they haven't fertilized, too, to try and pollinate themselves? Sexual reproduction is weird
I've been walking around for 40 years thinking those little dots on the leaves of ferns just ... grew into ferns. I knew they were called "spores" but didn't see why ... I knew "ferns are primitive" but didn't see how that should mean anything this bonkers was going on.
Ferns have been getting away with this all this time!
@futurebird@craftycat Sixty years on I still remember a young biology teacher explaining the sexual and asexual stages in the reproduction of ferns, with the spores producing a thallus (He made the point of emphasising that it was a "th" to a classroom of stupid giggling adolescent boys) and the then sexual stage from the thallus with motile gametes to the development of a fern. I find it fascinating to this day.
I think that's how it was done long ago and ferns never streamlined the process? For algae in water sexual reproduction isn't a big deal, right? Send the gametes, it's easy. When plants moved to land they had a big problem, how to have that glorious mingling?
It's almost like ferns have a vascular form, then it's like they go back to acting like liverworts to reproduce??
That's what I'm seeing!
Ferns have been HIDING this from us all. Wait till this blows up. "FERNS EXPOSED"
@futurebird From what I gathered from the thread it just looks like your part of the world and mine have different educational programmes. I knew there were some differences but it's first time I can see them "irl" (if I can call the digital convo such lol)
@Twarda@futurebird Indeed! This is in the 6th grade textbook in most of the exUSSR coutries.
And there are lots of fern gametophytes on the bare wet soil in the temperate forest, really hard to miss once you know what you're looking for.
@tyx @Twarda@futurebird
The terms feel familiar to me, so we probably did learn it (early 00s in Slovakia, so not exUSSR, but ex eastern-block), but I definitely didn't understand it.
Just about anything complex or strange in biology tends to make more sense when you come at it from the standpoint of "what did this evolve from?" and "why did it evolve like this?"
All of these living things are doing whatever they are doing for a reason, and in the most general sense we know what that reason is: somehow it was a more effective way to survive than whatever they were doing before that.
This is why trying to take evolution out of biology kills it.
@Twarda@futurebird
the biology courses I took in both high school and university did not cover this. In fact, they left out all sorts of interesting things, some of which I learned anyway, because I read a lot, including books by science communicators like Stephen Jay Gould.
@Twarda@futurebird
I majored in computer science, at a small university in the western USA. The biology requirement was there because the university required it for every major, but somehow that didn't make it important enough to contain interesting stuff; instead it seemed to suffer from efforts to placate complaints that the course was too hard by removing all the interesting stuff.
@llewelly@Twarda@futurebird
> suffer from efforts to placate complaints that the course was too hard by removing all the interesting stuff
as someone who's been subject to a recent demand for something similar i'm suddenly regretting my decision to summarily dismiss it a whole lot less (the negative number strays further from zero)
We had the option to opt out of taking biology in HS and take advanced physics and chem instead.
Since these were the "harder sciences" that's where I got pushed. So all the biology I learned in school was under 8th grade.
And I'm starting to think that was BAD. It's also bad that kids who are good at math and excited about STEM get steered away from geology, biology, etc. we are messing up big time with this move.
@futurebird there has been a lot of changes in our education system since but I'm pretty sure they taught us about various plants' life cycles in gymnasium (kid ages 12 - 15). Currently gymnasium was merged to elementary school and I heard they simplified the knowledge requirements so not sure if that's true anymore.
I definitely had that in high school too, just more detailed; biochem class specialisation with medical rescue.
@futurebird@Twarda I am with you. My school district let my parents opt me out of high school biology as well. I was quite happy as high school biology was primarily dissections to teach evolution.
When I went to college & took molecular biology focused general biology (with models instead of dead creatures for the dissection labs) it was a much better experience. All the math & chemicals & genetics interested me far more than taking apart dead animals (only the pre-meds enjoyed that).
@futurebird@Twarda Elementary/middle school was worse, as they just stapled sections of the textbooks shut for biology to avoid "controversy", aka evolution.
@futurebird@Laplantgenetics@Twarda
not coincidentally, the same people who don't want children taught evolution also have highly restrictive ideas about what art children should be allowed to appreciate, and what music they should be allowed.
@llewelly@futurebird@Laplantgenetics@Twarda The ultra-Orthodox Jewish school that used to rent classrooms in my synagogue had an astronomy poster up on the wall, and the teachers had carefully added paper stars to the poster to cover up references to the age of the universe, seeing as how their community, or at least some segments of it, believe the universe was created <6,000 years ago.
@Twarda@llewelly@futurebird@Laplantgenetics Well, yes, exactly. I assume it isn't news to you that that's what these communities do.
All extremist religions censor what is taught to their kids, and of course when things get bad like they are now in the US they also start trying to censor what is taught to everyone else's kids too.
@jik@llewelly@futurebird@Laplantgenetics No it isn't news for me but rather the fact this goes unregulated makes this fact sad. Everyone should have access to the common knowledge and decide on their own what to do with it. Kids especially should be able to learn.
I think CA required evolution to be in our elementary science textbooks, which is why it was stapled by the teacher who disagreed with it. (Also, stapling the textbook will raise kids' interest in the subject more than skipping it when teaching).
We had a bunch of older women who taught elementary school & didn't like "new-fangled" things like science. They felt elementary school should be reading, writing & basic arithmetic only and resented being asked to teach science or history. (A remnant of the times when most kids didn't finish HS, instead going to work after 8th grade?) I went to school at a weird time, it felt like everything was in transition from the old ways of learning to something new.
@Laplantgenetics@futurebird The honors-science teacher for my kid in 7-8th grades doesn't believe in evolution. (Kid has since escaped to high school. Teacher is still there.)
@billseitz@Laplantgenetics@futurebird the creationism club at my HS (late 90s) was sponsored by the physics teacher and the earth science teacher. The bio teacher taught anti-evolution. This was western Michigan.
@futurebird@Laplantgenetics@Twarda It's always crazy and chilling to read and remember the weight of the creationists, whom I discovered more than 20 years ago during a fairly short period working in the States. Here in Europe it's still very marginal and, in any case, it's not part of the official teaching
In the US and Canada, the hardline creationists have largely conceded that battle -- for the moment -- and moved onto their next big point, which is as we know the reversal of social norms and mores. There are certainly echoes now and then, though...
20-25 years ago, though, that was a fraught time. It was then that the 'teaching the controversy' bit was making real waves, to the mutual detriment of teachers and students, and thus wasn't a good time to do much of anything in, for example, a high school in Texas.
I've never understood it, myself. If you want people to appreciate the full glory and majesty of God's creation, why wouldn't you show how She put together a universe where things can gradually grow and mutate and eventually, given sufficient time, evolve into a freaking cat?
@futurebird@Laplantgenetics@Twarda It's amazing how little understanding there is of basic evolutionary principles of there. I've had conversations with CompSci PhDs who had deep misunderstandings about the fundamentals of evolutionary change -- basic stuff like how quickly small statistical population differences can be amplified over successive generations, believing that there are teleological drivers for evolutionary fitness, etc.
Evolution is one of the most beautiful and informative theories out there. It explains so much about the diversity of life, and is so deeply supported by all the available evidence.
The fact that it's not more widely taught is a crime on par with the silencing of Galileo. Evolution is as much of a fact as gravity, yet religious fundamentalists have still managed to suppress it.
@futurebird@Laplantgenetics@Twarda
The FASH don't want music or art either, just a national anthem and iconography. Defunding, censoring culture & arts is their playbook.
Music, art, book, films not under their control help people learn, empathise, feel hope, break boundaries, question, grow, aspire to better.
@futurebird@Twarda I regret taking AP physics instead of AP Bio. And I did it for the reasons you state. Physics was hard, and beyond basic mechanics, not useful.
The gametophytes of ferns really make me think out what haploid and inter-"individual" cells in other organisms actually are. Like, a fern gametophyte is a form of a plant that's still fully a fern, it's just, different. So what are sperm and ova? They're alive. They're individual. They're human. They're just really, really different than our multicellular for. But are they not, in a way, all human lives?
@futurebird@Twarda Honestly I already find the division between arts and sciences somewhat arbitrary. The division between soft and hard sciences increasingly arbitrary. And the idea that there are "harder" sciences within the actual "hard" sciences to be actually disappointing.
@futurebird@Twarda I was forbidden to take "Earth science" (geology/ meteorology/ marine sciencey stuff/ other stuff) because I had to take physics with the other kids in the "college bound" track. I resent this forever.
@futurebird@catmisgivings@Twarda It lets people study what they're interested in and develop a love of learning instead of making it something that's just forced on you.
It can work that way but just as often it's used to foist some of the most limited "curriculums" on young people.
One Christian home school program used in Utah had the girls studying "home economics" for about half the school day... and really this was just doing chores and mending clothing. No one learned evolution. The boys did accounting, well some of them.
I wanted to take playwriting and so I pestered the drama teacher until he agreed to offer it at 7:30 am before school (I got everyone who like me "needed" AP english to sign up and bullied the rest of the kids who didn't have that conflict)
Would have loved a scifi class even more, but I split the difference and wrote science fiction plays.
I think I took a few years off that poor teacher's life. Getting paid back for it now since I have such students LOL
@futurebird@billseitz@catmisgivings@Twarda My high school had a sci fi class 🙂 We read things like Left Hand of Darkness, Neuromancer, Dune. Our final project was to make a time machine prototype and present it to the class (you got extra credit if it worked).
(This was like a weird no-grades/student-directed public high school influenced by the Spanish Anarchist "Escuela Moderna" movement from the early 20th century. Classes didn't start until 9AM)
You know how STEM people look down their nose at the social sciences and arts?
Well it should not be surprising that they turn right around and look down their nose at each other in the same way.
I was literally told that I was "too good at math" to take and "easy course" like biology. "colleges want to see you can do the real courses like physics"
@futurebird@catmisgivings@Twarda To me this sounds like someone saying "your handwriting is far too clear to study music, we need people like you over in the creative writing department!"
@futurebird@sidereal@catmisgivings@Twarda my understanding is that science is “harder” the more replicable it is. So Physics is the hardest, then Chemistry, Biology/Geology.
And Math you ask? Well, Math is not a science for some weird reason… Engineering are “applied science” so frowned upon too.
As a biochem student in uni I never got this, tbh. You need to know Math and Physics and Chemistry to understand Bio, just math to understand Physics.
@futurebird@sidereal@erincandescent@tecnijota@catmisgivings@Twarda
Those would be simulations, no? The simulation is going to USE math, but the simulation is not going to tell you something about math, but something about whatever you are simulating (in physics, chemistry, biology etc.).
Maybe in numerics you can have some "math experiments", but I don't have a good example.
Before attempting to prove a theorem you make observations and notice patterns then think "could I prove that this is always true?"
You don't really know, then you attempt to prove it, and maybe you do, maybe you instead find a counterexample, maybe you prove that you can't prove it true or false.
Those are basically experiments, right?
I think what makes math strange is people just publish the results, not the experiment.
@futurebird@denki@sidereal@tecnijota@catmisgivings@Twarda In the sciences, you come up with a hypothesis, and then you work out an experiment that can demonstrate or disprove your hypothesis (to a sufficient confidence interval) in the real world
In maths theres no need to demonstrate things in the real world, since you're working in the abstract world of mathematics
@erincandescent
Mathematics IS an aspect of the real world. It is not invented by mathematicians but rather discovered by them.
You can see this if you think about π, for example. Any sufficiently advanced alien society would also discover π. They might call it differently or encode its approximations differently, but it will still be the relation between circumference and diameter of a circle. @futurebird@sidereal@tecnijota@catmisgivings@Twarda
This is an age old question in math. I generally agree that anyone will discover the same mathematics ... but at the same time we must recognize the extreme degree to which mathematics is shaped by the human body and mind.
Abstract logic enjoys the widest consensus because its based on how we subtize, categorize and process stimuli. Our core geometries are based on the scale and physics of our bodies.
You made me wonder if counting on another base system would change math (like babylonian who counted in base 12 if I remember correctly( and I found this fascinating wikipedia article about counting in golden number-base: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio_base
The base numbers are expressed in won't change any theorems, but it will change what you notice, what you choose to prove, the direction of exploration into the mathematical realm.
What if there's another fundamental constant that is critical to understanding math and science, that many alien worlds figured out, but that humans for some inexplicable reason, haven't even found yet?
And lack of discovering this constant has limited our understanding of math and science, and is why we can't understand how everything is connected (haven't even figured out unified theory yet)
Most of the big constants that humans use are 1-dimensional scalar values. But what if all the fun happens at 50x50x50x50 matrix constants? Human brains have a hard time even visualizing these.
Sure we might get there eventually, but our brain limitations mean that we have to invent computers first to then do this thinking for us. But maybe we can't ever build smart enough computers without this constant?🤔
@sidereal@catmisgivings@futurebird@Twarda
when I was in HS, more than a quarter century ago, the belief among administrators and politicians was that mining and refining provided many jobs which didn't require college; if that was what you were interested in, they'd direct you to the labor side of that industry. I don't know whether that belief accurately reflected the industry, either then or now, but that's how they acted in the western USA where mining has a lot of political power.
@catmisgivings@futurebird@Twarda Physicist here. They were trying to get you started on thinking scientifically. Only physics is simple enough for HS students to do that.
e.g., To students who don’t know the Coriolis Force, meteorology is just a list of facts to memorize. It’s not science.
@futurebird@Twarda i have the opposite regret that i never pursued chemistry past gr 10 (which was still a general science course that covered chem + physics + bio). i dropped out of 11th grade chem because of [turmoil] and because the instructor was not very good. not because she was mean or anything - she was just fresh out of teacher's college and obviously very green. i suppose some class had to be her first, and it happened to be us. 🤷 oh well. but i've always wished i'd continued in chem.
@futurebird@Twarda very much this. If you were in earth sciences in my school, you were "dumb." It was toxic and wrong, and the adults perpetuated that culture. It makes mad.
@abetterjulie@Twarda The more I think about it the more preposterous it seems— but then these pronouncements become self-fulfilling: academically serious students avoid biology and ‘earth science’ — students with less confidence gravitate towards it- the teachers then end up adjusting the depth of the material to to meet the students— so the so call “easy” science classes end up both easy and more boring. This happens in math as well and I’ve been striving to fight it.
@abetterjulie@futurebird@Twarda 1950s Ireland, my mother was passionately interested in sewing. But she was "bright", so she went to university to do organic chemistry. Which she wasn't passionately interested in so she dropped out. Status! It's a nightmare!
@Ailbhe@abetterjulie@futurebird@Twarda That reminds me of how my brothers despair of my inability to repair things. They always forget they were allowed to take shop class and I wasn't, because I was supposed to be the academic one.
(Also "girls have to work harder to be taken seriously", which was at once true and self-fulfilling.)
@futurebird yeah, the scandal is so huge it covers practically all plants - they all do some weird "alternation of generations" thing. (Well, I don't know of any exceptions, but I'm not a botanist.)
@futurebird
my favorite guess is that alternation of generations has something to do with dispersal.
plants: as a rule, plants don't move, except when they do something so weird the rules don't understand what the plants are doing and thus don't recognize it as "movement".
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