Big Idea 1: Evolution

The process of evolution drives the diversity and unity of life. Two of the podcasts I had been listening to connected to this big idea much more than the others. These two were; Cell Mates, and Henrietta’s Tumor. Cell Mates definitely puts evolution into perspective where we start to realize that all living things started out as a singular cell and then boom, there was an entire world with hundreds of millions of cells in each living being. The way that this likely happened is that a freak accident occurred and all things became possible such as copying and placing DNA. Now in one place in our Earths history two little bacterium drifted towards eachother and they ended up bonding and merge… this was the freak accident I was writing about earlier. This one time is a .0001% chance thing that could happen if you’re catching my drift. But here’s where it gets even crazier, the cell that merged and got inside the other started dividing over and over and over and over and this process kept happening on and on and on. From this, the cells weren’t just bacteria or little unimportant cells but rather they were mitochondria which are the powerhouse of the cells. This is what powers life and lets life grow with storage of genes and growing. Taking this from one single merger billions of years ago, we get this big world where the same process is occurring and is expanding. This is basically our tree of life. The way that we know this is how we came about, is if we look at our cells, we can see these cells that are the same as those mitochondria from the beginning. The second podcast that I was listening to, was called Henriettas tumor. Henriettas tumor talks about this woman who died 50+ years ago but pieces of her still live on today. This may not make sense but I will explain. Henrietta died of cervical cancer, after she died a doctor harvested pieces of her tumors. This harvesting allowed for research since experimenting on live, thinking, breathing humans is in humane. This is why the tumor was harvested. But here’s what’s crazy, if the tumor was split up it would continue to grow and “live” with Henriettas original DNA. Similar to cloning rat’s and sheep, this process allowed for scientists to jumpstart the process of evolution all over again with taking little pieces of the tumor and it grows with all the same DNA, which is the same as the Big Bang just like in Cell mates. The little singular cells merged and then started splitting up and growing over and over. This is Evolution.