Travels of a Fish Nut

Physics has fundamental forces as its core. Chemistry has its elements. And the fundamental unit of biology is the species. In this regard it's been likened to stamp collecting. A more modern analogy might be to Pokemon - gotta catch em all! Like chemists studying elements, once we know the different species we can work out how they interact with each other and how they work. And in so doing we can learn about our natural world. Fun stuff! But what actually is a species?   What is a Species? You probably learned the "biological species" definition at school. This definition states that: species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations, which are reproductively isolated from other such groups (Mayr, 1942) This is an often-used definition, which is why you learn it in school, but there are problems with it. For one thing, there are species that are parthenogenetic , meaning they don't breed but reproduce asexually, with the egg developing ...

This is another long post with a lot of complicated words. I'm sorry about that, but this will hopefully be the last post like this for a while. In the next one we'll start looking at the different types of animals.  What is natural selection? Here’s an experiment for you to try. It will take both of you and your mum to watch and time you (and maybe help with the maths).

Evolution is a simple concept when explained well (which I hope I will be able to do!) but in order to fully understand it I need to explain a few things about cell biology. I will make this as brief and simple as possible because it’s not our focus at the moment (though if I am able to keep up these posts it will be at a later date) but it involves some complicated words and ideas which I can't really avoid so apologies in advance.

What is biology? Biology is the study of living things. Living things include animals, plants, bacteria and possibly viruses. Rather than having to write that every time, we use the word " organism " to mean all those different types of living things.

These posts are primarily for Dan and Sophie to teach them some biology though if they get a wider audience then that's great.  Dan and Sophie, I'm going to try and write in the form of questions and answers so that your mum can ask you the questions and you can try and answer them before you hear my answers. You won't be able to answer all of them but I thought it would help you to think about things if I wrote like this rather than just making a lot of essays for you to read. If you have questions you can either put them in the comments or email them to me and I'll reply as best I can. If I'm not being clear or it's too complicated please let me know. Equally, if I'm telling you things you already know tell me and I'll make it more interesting. What I thought I'd do is write a couple of introductory posts about biology and evolution and then I want to tell you about the different types of animals that are alive today. Starting with sponges, j...