The one, and sometimes only, opportunity we have to reach all of our undergraduates is in freshman biology. A second opportunity comes if we can get students to take an organismal course like introductory botany, invertebrate zoology, mycology, or entomology. The following suggestions apply equally well to all such courses, but I will focus on Freshman Biology, which in my university is taught in two separate one-semester courses: Cellular Processes and Biodiversity. We use one of the standard large college texts for introductory biology.
The second course, Biodiversity, sounds good, but it has an ambitious amount of material to cover. It is divided roughly into three sections: Evolution, Diversity, and Ecology. The section on Diversity, which might get five weeks out of the semester, is usually a rapid march through the kingdoms and phyla. Plants usually only get 1-2 weeks of discussion in lecture, fungi even less, more often than not by an instructor who has not had much training in botany or mycology. The sections on animal and plant biology in the textbook are largely ignored in our courses, but they contain much additional information that can and should be brought in to help elucidate biodiversity issues.
The net result is that after this course in Biodiversity students have only a superficial introduction to diverse kinds of life, and have no real understanding of why there are so many different kinds of organisms. The coherent biodiversity message will only emerge if an experienced and skillful instructor is motivated to do so, and willing to synthesize material from different parts of the book. The more we can integrate our discussions of evolutionary and ecological principles with questions about biodiversity, rather than treating them as three separate topics, the better. This is a tall order for the limited time available in a freshman course, so you have to choose your battles carefully.
Here are some ideas, with links to my blog essays that discuss these topics in detail:
1. Think in terms of adaptation. This is the key concept that links evolution, ecology, and biodiversity together. Adaptation is what results from the evolutionary process, it defines how organisms interact with their environment, and it is what differentiates the distinctive lifestyle of one organism from another. Organism A is different from organism B because, since their common ancestry, they have had different adaptive histories, and have diverged into different lifestyles. They have come to live in different environments or to survive in the same environment in different ways.
3. "What good is half an eye?" Make use of some of the great questions posed by anti-evolutionists (though answered wrongly by them). By focusing on a single topic, like vision, one can trace the origins of light detection in bacteria, through the simple eyespots of protists, the simple eyes of flatworms, and then the diverse kinds of eyes found in cephalopods (squids, octopi), insects, and vertebrates. There never was half an eye, always light detecting systems that became more complex and varied over time. We can even bring in plants with their light-detecting systems involved in phototropism (bending toward light), and photoperiodism (determining when plants bloom.)
4. "If humans evolved from apes, why are there still apes?" Another great question that illustrates the diversifying nature of evolution. From the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, the chimp lineage continued to hone their adaptations for life in the forest, while human ancestors adapted for life in the open savanna, with skeletal changes that allowed them to stand upright and walk comfortably on two legs. Students really take interest in human evolution, and so it is worthwhile to spend time on it.
Animals are eating machines, with mouth and eyes at the front end, and locomotory organs along the side. Their food resources are in compact packages - other organisms - that they digest internally. |
hydrostatic nature of plant cells and plant processes that substitute for muscular activity in animals.
3. Why are there no moss trees? Everyone knows, at least by the time they get to college, how animals make babies. The varied equipment and various strategies for getting sperm and egg together are a wonderful theme for exploring animal diversity, but how do plants do it? Plant (or fungus) reproduction, however, is always a challenge. If you're stuck in one spot, and a potential mate is 50 meters away, how do get your sperm to her? The astute student will immediately shout "pollen grains." But how many know that there are actually sperm cells produced within pollen grains, and that pollen grains, and the structures that house the eggs are actually tiny. haploid individuals?
The leafy, long-lived phase of a moss life cycle is the egg and sperm producing gametophyte. The simple sporophytes consist only of a single sporangium and its stalk, which develops from the fertilized egg, and which remains attached to the gametophyte plant for its short existance. |
Pursuing these sorts of discussions is of more value than memorizing the characteristics of all the phyla of invertebrates, or the differences between club mosses and horsetails. Horsetails can be brought in, however, as an early example of the kind of multiple elongating (intercalary) meristems used by bamboos for their rapid growth in height.(convergent evolution). Ultimately, we can try to understand why there are so many kinds of plants, and how to avoid the extinction of all those species.