Exploring Life
 

1. What is meant by the concept of emergent properties of life?
2. What characteristics are usually used to describe something that is alive?
3. Name the major levels of the taxonomic and organizational hierarchies of life. (i.e. where do  levels such as Kingdom or Genus fit into the taxonomic scheme and where do levels such as cell or organism fit into the organizational scheme?)
4. What do we mean by evolution?  How does natural selection result in evolution?
5. What do we mean by the following statements?
• The cell is the basic building block of life.
• All cells come from preexisting cells.
• DNA contains the genetic information for life.
• Structure and function are generally well correlated.
• Evolution acts as an overriding theme in biology.
6. How does science operate?
• Understand that science makes progress through hypothesis testing.
• What is a experimental control?
• In general, how would one design an experiment to test a hypothesis?
• How does this process use induction and deduction?
• How are scientific findings probabilistic?
• Why can scientists not "prove" a hypothesis?
• What is a scientific theory, and how is it different from a hypothesis or mere speculation?