LESSON 1: A Picture of Life Framed by Evolution

Welcome to Biology 115! We hope that you find this course interesting and stimulating, and that you will be inspired to forge ahead in your studies of the biological world.

To introduce you to the course, we would like to present to you in the following lessons two themes that you will see reiterated throughout the semester:

1. The diversity in life and life’s processes that we see today has come about as a result of the differential survival and reproduction rates of organisms.
   
2. While life is astoundingly diverse in many ways, there are also many commonalities found in all life that result from shared evolutionary histories.

As you move through the course, keep these themes in mind – they should help you keep a grip on the material, and help you make sense of the living world. Good luck, and welcome to the amazing world of Cells and the Evolution of Life!

Topics covered in this Lesson

• The Game of Life
• The Big Picture

The Game of Life

The Game of Life is a serious one for all living organisms. An organism must be able to perform certain tasks to live, and it faces competition from other individuals and species. During this course we will examine the “rules” of the Game of Life.

Learning Objectives

• Understand what resources, especially limiting resources, are.

• Know that resource competition creates “winners” and “losers”.

• Know that natural selection refers to the difference in survival and reproduction success of individuals within a population.

• Know that evolution refers to the gradual changes in the characteristics possessed by the “winners”.

• Understand that improvements in the ability to capture and efficiently use energy have been the major driving forces in evolution.