Summer AP Biology Assignment

Sorry I did not upload this sooner; some of you are apparently eager to get going on this.

Your summer assignment is essentially a series of questions which altogether should require some reading and writing of no more than 4-5 pages (more than 5 pages will lose points and less than 3 pages will lose points). The assignment will be valued at 30 points; the same as a lab report. You are expected to cite your sources and the writing must be yours alone (i.e. do not simply cut and paste from a variety of sources). Over the course of the summer I will be adding additional source material that you will be able to find in the “Handouts” section of the website. You may of course feel free to use other sources that are appropriate to the questions.

Question 1:

What are the characteristics of life, i.e. how do we distinguish something that is living from something that is not? While you can probably find a number of sources to answer this question try at least initially to answer it yourself. Would your characteristics define a virus as living? How about a robot?

Question 2:

There are three logical possibilities for the origin of life on earth, (1) divine, (2) extraterrestrial, and (3) chemical. Science dictates that possibilities or hypotheses be testable which pretty much eliminates the first possibility leaving the second two. Since we currently have no evidence of life elsewhere we pretty much have to place the second possibility on hold which leaves us with the third possibility, for which in fact we do have some evidence. Read through the sources that I have provided and summarize current thinking on the origin of life on earth. There are several areas in the current theory that are not well explained. Identify and elaborate on one of these briefly.

Question 3:

Thermodynamics tells us that if energy is put into a system that the temperature of the system must rise or its entropy must decrease. The earth’s biosphere can be represented as a system. Discuss what this means with respect to climate temperature and biological diversity on earth.