Lecture 1

A. Concept and Manifestations of Life

B. Methods in the Study of Biology
C. Origin of Life
Biology is the study of life
 The Concept of Life

“What is life?” Only three simple words, and yet

out of them spins a universe of questions that are
no less challenging. What precisely is it that
separates the animate from the inanimate? What
are the basic ingredients of life? Where did life first
stir? How did the first organisms evolve? Is there
life everywhere? To what extent is life scattered
across the cosmos? If other kinds of creatures do
exist on exoplanets, are they as intelligent as we
are, or even more so?

- J. Craig Venter, Life at the Speed of Light (2013)

 The Concept of Life

 life is a particular set of processes that

result from the organization of matter

 life resists a
simple, one-
sentence
definition

 yet we can
recognize life
by what living
things do
Manifestations and Characteristics of Life
1. Organization and Order

 living things have a complex organization

 characteristics
of life emerge
from an
organism’s
organization
2. Metabolism and Homeostasis

 energy utilization

 organisms
take in
energy and
transform it to
do work
2. Metabolism and Homeostasis

70-100 mg/dl
3. Reproduction

 organisms produce their own kind

4. Growth and Development

 heritable programs (DNA) direct pattern of

growth and development
5. Irritability and movement

 capable of response to environmental stimulus

6. Variation, change, and evolution
6. Variation, change, and evolution

African wild Coyote Fox Wolf Jackal

dog

Thousands to
millions of years
of natural selection

Ancestral canine
 Physical entities with some of the characters of
living organisms: viruses
 obligate intracellular parasites
 made up of nucleic acid enclosed in a protein coat
 sometimes wrapped in a membranous envelope
 Physical entities with some of the characters of
living organisms: viroids
 plant pathogens composed of molecules of
naked circular RNA only several hundred
nucleotides long

Electron microscopic picture of potato

http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/graphics/photos/oct01/k3145-1.htm
spindle tuber viroid (PSTVd)
Physical entities with some of the characters of
living organisms: prions

 infectious forms of protein that may

increase in number by converting related
proteins to more prions

Microscopic image of a
tissue sample from
human brain showing a
clump of infectious
prions
Scientific Method
 The Nature of Science
• Deductive Reasoning
– Examining individual cases by applying
accepted general principles.

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 The Nature of Science
• Inductive Reasoning
– Discovering general principles through
examination of specific cases.

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required for reproduction or display
 The Nature of Science
• Abductive Reasoning
– starts with an incomplete set of observations
and proceeds to the likeliest possible
explanation for the group of observations
– making and testing hypotheses using the best
information possible

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required for reproduction or display
 Quiz
• A for Deductive Reasoning
• B for Inductive Reasoning
• C for Abductive Reasoning
SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY
 Scientific Process
• Observation - Careful observation of a
process or phenomenon
• Hypothesis - Guess concerning the
observation
– May generate multiple hypotheses.
• Prediction - Expected consequences of a
correct hypothesis
 Scientific Process
• Experiment - Test of a hypothesis
– Controlled Experiment - All factors influencing
the experiment (controls) must be kept
constant.
• Conclusion - Draw a conclusion from the
results
– Reject or fail to reject hypothesis
 Theory and Certainty
• Theory - set of hypotheses that have been
thoroughly tested over time, and generally
accepted by the scientific community
– acceptance is always provisional
• to the general public a theory is synonymous with
a guess due to lack of knowledge
 Limitations of Science
 Scientific study is limited to area that can
be observed and measured
o cannot be used to address all questions
o bound by practical limits
- temporal and spatial considerations
 Biological Methods
 techniques or procedures that are used to
study living things

 include experimental and computational

methods, approaches, protocols and tools
for biological research
 Theories on the origin of life

1. Spontaneous Generation Theory

2. Biogenesis

3. Special Creation
4. Biogeochemical Theories

5. Interplanetary or Cosmozoic Theory

1. Spontaneous Generation

 living organisms could develop

spontaneously from nonliving matter
 from the time of the Greeks until the 19th
century it was common “knowledge” that
life could arise from nonliving matter
 Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) thought that
some of the simpler invertebrates could
arise by spontaneous generation
1. Spontaneous Generation

 In 1668, Francesco Redi made a simple

experiment to demonstrate that maggots
do not arise spontaneously from decaying
matter.

decaying meat

maggots
decaying meat
1. Spontaneous Generation

 In 1745, John Needham, claimed that

microbes develop spontaneously from
nutrient fluids.
1. Spontaneous Generation
 In 1765, Lazzaro Spallanzani, showed
that nutrient fluids heated after being
sealed in flasks did not develop microbial
growth.

Longer boiling

Needham’s set-up Spallanzani’s set-up

1. Spontaneous Generation

 In 1862, Louis
Pasteur did
experiments
which provided
the final
argument to
disprove the
theory
 Pasteur
conducted broth
experiments that
rejected the idea
of spontaneous
generation

Copyright © 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings

2. Biogenesis

 proposed by Rudolf Virchow in the 1850s

 living organisms whether simple or

complex can arise only from preexisting
living organisms (cell theory)

 doesn’t answer the question how life

began on earth
3. Special Creation

 states that life on earth was created by

some supernatural force or being

 each species represented a separate act

of creation
 God said, “Let the land produce
vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees
on the land that bear fruit with seed in it,
according to their various kinds.” And it
was so. Gen 1:11
3. Special Creation

 God said, “Let the water teem with living

creatures, and let birds fly above the earth
across the expanse of the sky.” 21So God
created the great creatures of the sea and
every living and moving thing with which
the water teems, according to their kinds,
and every winged bird according to its
kind. Gen 1:20-21
3. Special Creation

 based on faith

 cannot be subjected to scientific inquiry or

be tested in any lab
4. Biogeochemical Theory

 life may have evolved from inorganic matter

 traces possible events of the formation of

biomolecules under primitive earth
conditions to the evolution of the cell and
various cell processes
 most scientists favor the hypothesis that life
on Earth developed from nonliving materials
that became ordered into aggregates that
were capable of self-replication and
metabolism
 between 4.0 billion years ago, when the
Earth’s crust began to solidify, and 3.5
billion years ago when stromatolites
appear, the first organisms came into being

Copyright © 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings

 chemical and physical processes in Earth’s
primordial environment eventually produced
simple cells

 this occurred in four stages:

(1) the abiotic synthesis of small organic molecules

(2) joining these small molecules into polymers

(3) origin of self-replicating molecules

(4) packaging of these molecules into “protobionts”

 Copyright © 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings
 In the 1920’s, A.I. Oparin and J.B.S.
Haldane independently postulated that
conditions on the early Earth favored the
synthesis of organic compounds from
inorganic precursors.

 The reducing environment in the early

atmosphere would have promoted the
joining of simple molecules to form more
complex ones.

Copyright © 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings

 In 1953, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey
tested the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis
by creating, in the laboratory, the
conditions that
had been postulated
for early Earth.

Copyright © 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings

 Living cells may have been preceded by
protobionts, aggregates of abiotically
produced molecules.
 major debates also concern where life evolved
- shallow water or moist sediments
- deep sea vents

Copyright © 2002 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Benjamin Cummings

5. Interplanetary or Cosmozoic Theory

 life originated on a distant planet

 the most important reason for invoking an
extraterrestrial origin for life, probably in a
hydrothermal habitat, is that such an origin
provides a greater timespan for early
evolution than has been available on Earth
 Panspermia is applied to the possible
dispersion of life throughout the galaxy
 Directed panspermia describes the deliberate
seeding of life on Earth by intelligent beings