Study Guide I

Environmental Biology: ESPM6

2020

Life: Its Qualitites, Behaviour and Scales

Use this Guide to read yourself into the questions posed. While some leads are given in the form
of references, you will likely want to seek many other points of references: your Instructors
(GSIs, ICh), other colleagues and teachers, friends and relatives, the internet. Talking widely to
others about the questions (instead of dealing with them alone) helps a lot. Remember, these
questions are Guides, and therefore you should not expect to have “a right answer” for them.
Instead, you should be reassured that you will be able to deal with the quiz if you understand the
facts and concepts implied in the question.

Please be prepared to take a quiz based on this Guide on Thursday, Sept 24th

1. Consider the difficult problem of defining Life as a noun (i.e. a “thing”). Are there
alternatives (other ways of understanding or speaking about it) to the way this problem is
presented?

2. Quoting from Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time (Polity, 2017), who refers to Marcel
Proust:

“Proust is apparently convinced that in its depth life represents a densely woven net of
connected events, and

that life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one
event to another, and that these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled
and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our
past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infinite
variety of communicating paths to choose from.
Proust, In Search of Lost Time, vol.6, ‘Time Regained’, p.428”

How can we use this insight to help us with the difficult problem of defining Life? What words
in these quoted texts can help in moving away from thinking of Life as a Noun, i.e. a Thing?

3. Consider the popular article from the Australian Academy of Science (Berthold, E. The
Animals that Can Live Forever, no date), found in this link:

https://www.science.org.au/curious/earth-environment/animals-can-live-forever
Note that you may want to follow further the links provided in this article.

(a) In what regard is “living forever” unique to a few jelly fish, hydrae and other life-forms,
and in what sense can the “tricks” of the jelly fish Turritopsis dohrnii be found in many
other life forms?
 (b) Are we (humans) the phylogenetic descendants of “dead” people? In what sense is there
continuity between you and your ancestors, and how far back in the phylogenetic
dimension can you follow this continuity?
(c) What evidence are you provided in this undated online article to give you confidence that
you should trust what Emma Berthold says in it? How long do you think this evidence
will be available—let’s say, do you think you will be able to share this question and your
answers to it with your grand-children?

4. Still thinking about the phylogenetic dimension of Life, consider the work of Jill
Banfield, from our ESPM Department at Berkeley. Jill Banfield and colleagues have
produced new phylograms that include life-forms that are not visible, and have not been
cultured or otherwise seen. One such phylogram was shown in lecture, but you can find
them online, for example here:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867418301600#fig1

What actions do these authors do to find evidence of these life-forms (i.e. their basic
method)? In their phylograms, what does “DPANN” stand for?

5. Think about space and the spatial scales where life happens. What is the smallest spatial-
scale at which life happens (for current views on this question, check out question 4)?
What is the largest?

6. Think about time and the history of our universe, such as we can figure it out. What is the
oldest point in time where life happened (call it “Time = 0”)? What evidence do we trust
to figure that? What is the furthest point in time that we think life has to exist (in other
words: how would you identify a point in the future when you can be sure of the
extinction of life)?

7. Can I say that I can completely describe you as a life-form if I make a list of (a) all the
molecules in your body, and (b) a three-dimensional map of where they are placed at this
moment? Why or why not?

8. Can we call the colony of a Leaf Cutter Ant, including the fungus that feeds the colony a
“Life-Form”? Why or why not?

Freebie. Prepare to give an very brief answer to the question below in the Quiz:

What came first, the chicken or the egg?