Ultimate Sciency Stuff

[kentington]

Post cool science articles and links and what not. All ranges of science articles that are cool, but keep it safe for work.

Introduction

This page describes our experience guiding groups of students through the dual process of conducting a basic genetics experiment with Drosophila melanogaster and documenting the project by creating Treehouse web pages. View a collection of the final products of this project in the Study of Fruit Fly Genetics at City High School Portfolio Treehouse.

Throughout the time students were conducting experiments with the flies, I (Molly Renner, biology teacher) interspersed lectures and homework related to genetics, DNA structure, etc. Those sheets are not included in this page, as they focus on the genetics experiments conducted by students, and the process that they went through to complete the fly crosses and document their work on the Tree of Life. Students were introduced to wild-type Drosophila (red eyes, normal wings) and also to two types of mutant flies (white-eyed and vestigial wings). They chose a mutant and crossed that fly type with wild type flies to observe the results. Most students chose to do reciprocal crosses, crossing wild males with (for example) vestigial females in Vial 1 and then wild females with vestigial males in Vial 2. The Project section of this page describes our process for conducting and documenting these student experiments.

http://tolweb.org/treehouses/?treehouse_id=4164

Pretty cool article about a high school project with fruit flies. I wish they did this when I was in school.




Rules: This is not the place to argue Evolution/Creationism. Please take it to the other million threads about it. You can however question the validity of an article and the arguments made within.

I started this thread because of Neoteny's comment about fruit flies and the spastic genetics of inbreeding. I don't believe in evolution, but I wasn't taught properly in school on the subject and so I am not offended if some of the links are about genetics or evolution.

More to come.

[Neoteny]

Full disclosure, and you may have figured this out/recalled this already: I'm an evilutionist, and I'm just trolling gillipig in that other thread. He doesn't seem to be destroying anyone like he promised, so I'll give up.

But Drosophila are awesome. I didn't encounter them until college, but I can see them transferring well to a high school environment.. They reproduce quickly and are super easy to care for. Like your post indicates, they are a great introduction to the scientific method, genetics and other fields, and scientific ethics.

[kentington]

Full disclosure, and you may have figured this out/recalled this already: I'm an evilutionist, and I'm just trolling gillipig in that other thread. He doesn't seem to be destroying anyone like he promised, so I'll give up.

I figured as much about the trolling, because I do remember that you support evolution. I couldn't tell exactly what parts of what you said were true. Were you serious about the inbreeding thing? I haven't heard of it before, that isn't saying much though.

[Neoteny]

It's not true. Someone pointed out that inbreeding unmasks deleterious recessive traits, and that's accurate. A lot of the crazy stuff that goes on, like legs growing in weird places, are usually caused by exposure to a mutagen, like UV, or direct genetic manipulation.