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So.
None of you thought it *might* be important to tell me that ferns have sperm that swim??? I just had to find all this out on my own?
And, (apparently, & no one thought to bring this up either
) fern plants are only one form... they have this 'other form' (tiny, ephemeral, difficult to find in the wild) alternates generations-- Fern spores don't grow into ferns! (WHAT) they grow into 'gemetophytes' (WHAT) THEN you get a fern.
Feel like I've uncovered a massive scandal.
@futurebird How so? They teach us this thing in schools?
Edit: I'm really sorry if this reads as condescending. It wasn't my goal. I was surprised and fascinated and should have worded it better...
We had the option to opt out of taking biology in HS and take advanced physics and chem instead.
Since these were the "harder sciences" that's where I got pushed. So all the biology I learned in school was under 8th grade.
And I'm starting to think that was BAD. It's also bad that kids who are good at math and excited about STEM get steered away from geology, biology, etc. we are messing up big time with this move.
Though I'm delighted to be 40 and finding childlike wonder in what I could have learned in a decent honors bio class. If my school HAD one. pfffft.
MAGFest 
@futurebird @Twarda Similar boat here. Also my freshman year I took “honors” chem with a super shitty and problematic teacher and didn’t learn anything but nomenclature and his personal life. Meanwhile my friends who took “regular” chem actually learned a lot. Makes me wonder what could have been lol
@futurebird @Twarda I regret taking AP physics instead of AP Bio. And I did it for the reasons you state. Physics was hard, and beyond basic mechanics, not useful.
@gretared @futurebird @Twarda HL bio in high school was the best class i ever took, including college. it just never stopped being cool to learn about.
@tmcw @gretared @futurebird @Twarda We had a marine bio class in high school. Still one of the best classes I ever experienced.
@futurebird @Twarda I wonder, are these school board decisions? I had a great hs biology teacher who lit my mind on fire, before she got fired by the school board for being too hard. Too bad the physics teacher was a grabby creep. That ended my love with math. Small choices, long term effects.
@futurebird there has been a lot of changes in our education system since but I'm pretty sure they taught us about various plants' life cycles in gymnasium (kid ages 12 - 15). Currently gymnasium was merged to elementary school and I heard they simplified the knowledge requirements so not sure if that's true anymore.
I definitely had that in high school too, just more detailed; biochem class specialisation with medical rescue.
@futurebird It got me curious why chemistry&physics was chosen while bio is omitted. Technically chem is a part of physics so I kinda understand the choice sentiment.
Here however you choose math&phys (both require lots of calculations) or bio&chem (since chemistry, especially biochemistry, is extremely important in bio to follow the enzymatic and whatnot reactions happening under the hood and understand stuff deeper)
Is there a reason why biology is excluded from "life sciences" over there?
@Twarda @futurebird >both require lots of calculations
Showed this to my colleague bioinformatician, she giggled, showed to another one - ecologist, he mumbled some swearwords and I heard "statistics", "GLM" and "Bayesian" among them, then I remembered obligatory "advanced calculus", "probability theory/statistics", "differential calculus in biology" from my freshman year, parts of "biochemistry" (kinetics) and three different courses of *ecology (parts about population dynamics, diffusion equations, popgen). And It's "Zoologist", what's written in my diploma.
Modern science is about math and phys. Almost all of it.
@tyx @futurebird I'm unsure if I understand this reply. I am aware of this and I did calculations, math, statistics etc on my studies as well. My point was that biology is somehow treated separately from "hard science" despite the fact it requires all of the above and I'm unsure why is that. Perhaps you meant this comment to be humorous?
@Twarda Sure I did! My weird humor sense doesn't combine well with my poor English.
@tyx Ah that's what I thought! I'm the Polish neighbour so my English is often all over the place as well :)
@Twarda I was just grumpy about people in education system, who take decisions about combining science modules like [(math+phys), (bio+chem),(geology+geography)] instead of doing [(math+phys), {(bio+chem),(geology+geography), (more math+more phys)}], really breaks understanding of many basic principles further and takes lots of effort in university to fix.
@tyx Indeed, the division is artificial and probably legacy based. However, I can see it also as an opportunity to focus on certain professional deeper rather than do jack of all trades master of none course. Eg. to my understanding at university level the student *should have* the *basic* geology/earth sciences understanding which is why it is commonly omitted from biochem modules.
That said I admit that I'd like to know more about geology than I got from my HS, more practical knowledge that is
@Twarda [Grumpy] And then they won't give me any grants because "you're not multidisciplinary enough" [/grumpy]
I used to think about higher ed from a researcher standpoint: "you'll be learning things all your life anyway, higher ed is just to teach you how to learn", so the broader then better - basic concepts like higher math are easier to grip at the beginning, and then you will spend all your life memorizing bat's call patterns and spot on the lizards.
BTW legacy in this field is much more sensible IMO - 150 years ago it was just physics, just with wiggling frog legs sometimes.
The gametophytes of ferns really make me think out what haploid and inter-"individual" cells in other organisms actually are. Like, a fern gametophyte is a form of a plant that's still fully a fern, it's just, different. So what are sperm and ova? They're alive. They're individual. They're human. They're just really, really different than our multicellular for. But are they not, in a way, all human lives?
@MichaelTBacon @futurebird @Twarda No, they are not in any way human lives.
To go back to the ferns, the gametophyte of a fern is not a sporophyte. The spores produced by a fern sporophyte are not ferns, they are spores. The sperm and egg produced by a fern gametophyte are not ferns, they are gametes.
Similarly, the sperm and eggs produced by humans are not humans, they are gametes.
[Edit: And of course, when human gametes fuse, you do not get a human. You get a zygote. Which develops into a morula. Which in mammals develops into a blastocyst. None of these are humans either. ]
@bhawthorne @futurebird @Twarda
Again, they're alive, they're individual, and they're human.
I have no intention of making any argument that those lives have any kind of equivalence with multicellular humans. I'm not extrapolating this to some kind of anti-"onanism" (ahem) or anti-abortion stance. If anything, it should be the opposite. Life doesn't begin at conception or at birth. Life never stops at any point.
@MichaelTBacon You wrote: “But are they not, in a way, all human lives?”
I wrote: “No, they are not in any way human lives.”
They are individual living human cells, yes. They are not human lives.
That's splitting hairs in the extreme.
What the example from the ferns helps illustrate is that many organisms have split life cycles that are partially diploid and partially haploid. The sporophyte and the gametophyte are both ferns.
Our species has a haploid life phase. It's just extremely short-lived and the vast majority don't reproduce.
@MichaelTBacon No, it is not splitting hairs. It is using words they way that most people understand them.
You seem to want to redefine words in ways that fit your philosophy, despite those redefinitions not matching the meanings that anyone else applies to the terms.
The sporophyte and gametophyte of ferns are different life stages of vascular plants in the order Polypodiopsida. “Ferns” in common parlance are the sporophyte life stages of those organisms. This is why we have a separate word for those sporophytes before they unfurl: fiddleheads. “Ferns” in botany is not a well-defined term, which is why we have more specific and clearly-defined terms for their physiology and taxonomy in botany.
As for our species, living humans are far more than cells of H. sapiens sapientes. Living humans consist of a collection of differentiated diploid H. sap. cells along with complex ecosystems of commensal microflora, organized into groupings of specialized cells called organs and organ systems, some with accompanying commensal ecosystems. A hangnail is part of a living human. It is not a human life, although it may contain living H. sap. cells for a short period after being removed from a living human. An H. sap. gamete is even less of a human life, although it may be a living haploid H. sap. cell.
If you insist on playing the Carrollian Humpty Dumpty redefinition game and trying to use words in ways contrary to the rest of us, you will likely end up like Mr. Dumpty himself. He thought he was the master of words, and ended up broken and ignored.
First off, I have no idea why you're dying on the hill that these are well-defined terms that are self-evidently obvious, rather than understanding them as colloquial usages that are naturally malleable. You're mad about something but I think it's because you're projecting something onto me.
I can't imagine someone saying "fiddleheads aren't really ferns." Of course they are.
Now as to what it is to be human . . .
@bhawthorne That's a complicated question on that's been argued over at the highest levels of philosophy and ontology for thousands of years in every tradition on the planet. I was just thumbing through some of the Zhuangzi last week for fun and there's poems about it in there.
As such, doing a little idle thought experiment about haploid individualism is not something terribly unusual nor is it any reason to get this worked up.
@bhawthorne Have a nice day.
@MichaelTBacon @futurebird @Twarda Sort of, but I think what defines a human isn’t that we are related to the life cycle of the human genome, it’s that we have a conscious experience. As far as I know, we don’t really understand what actually makes us experience things - just that there’s no solid evidence that anything that makes us “us” has any source outside our biology, either.
We can debate various parts of that, but I think folks are reading deeper meaning into what I'm saying than what I intend.
You can't say the cells aren't human. They're absolutely human. And they're alive. And in a very, very narrow way, they have their own lives.
As I said in another reply, they are not in any way equivalent to multicellular diploid humans. But they're human, and they're alive.
I don't intend anything more than a "huh, yeah" moment
@futurebird @Twarda hard agree. One of my favorite courses in college was geology. Something about being more “practical” in the sense that it directly related to the world around was fascinating to me and laid paths for deeper curiosity. Whenever geology topics come up now it gives me a good starting point for deeper exploration that the first principals of physics just can’t. (To be clear I enjoyed AP physics but to me it didn’t lead anywhere in particular.)
@futurebird @Twarda Honestly I already find the division between arts and sciences somewhat arbitrary. The division between soft and hard sciences increasingly arbitrary. And the idea that there are "harder" sciences within the actual "hard" sciences to be actually disappointing.
My father (a mathematician who did physics and geology) to me (neurodevelopmental-behavioral science) - “I have always done “hard science,” you are doing difficult science.”
@futurebird @Twarda
I may owe my life to school biology classes.
A few years ago, I got horrible nausea and stomach pain. The next day, the pain was mostly gone, but it was focused in my lower right abdomen. I thought, "Hmm, isn't that where my appendix is? I don't feel that sick, but l guess I'll go to urgent care just to be safe."
The urgent care doctor yelled at me and sent me to the emergency room. It turned out I did have appendicitis, and my appendix was close to rupturing.
@futurebird @Twarda I was forbidden to take "Earth science" (geology/ meteorology/ marine sciencey stuff/ other stuff) because I had to take physics with the other kids in the "college bound" track. I resent this forever.
@catmisgivings @futurebird @Twarda I felt that way about not being able to take a SciFi class instead of AP English
@billseitz @catmisgivings @Twarda
Maybe AP courses were a mistake.
@futurebird @billseitz @Twarda I'm not in a rush to agree, but only because I'm super proud of my 5 in AP Bio `:]
What sucks is the way schools will drag students into AP classes for the headcount to justify holding the course and/or steer interested students away ...
... if your school is privileged enough to have AP classes in the first place, that is.
@billseitz @catmisgivings @Twarda
I wanted to take playwriting and so I pestered the drama teacher until he agreed to offer it at 7:30 am before school (I got everyone who like me "needed" AP english to sign up and bullied the rest of the kids who didn't have that conflict)
Would have loved a scifi class even more, but I split the difference and wrote science fiction plays.
I think I took a few years off that poor teacher's life. Getting paid back for it now since I have such students LOL
@catmisgivings @futurebird @Twarda @billseitz karma won’t forget you. lol
@futurebird @billseitz @catmisgivings @Twarda My high school had a sci fi class 
We read things like Left Hand of Darkness, Neuromancer, Dune. Our final project was to make a time machine prototype and present it to the class (you got extra credit if it worked).
(This was like a weird no-grades/student-directed public high school influenced by the Spanish Anarchist "Escuela Moderna" movement from the early 20th century. Classes didn't start until 9AM)
@catmisgivings @futurebird @Twarda
My HS graduating class was over 500, but still they couldn't allow students to both meet all requirements and take both science and art. And you didn't have a lot of science options. And at the time, calculus wasn't available at the high school level so what you could get out of say, a physics class, was minimal.
And there was only one biology class available. One.
We were also the only high school in the entire state that offered a philosophy class. Of course I took it.
It was bleak.
@catmisgivings @futurebird @Twarda Physicist here. They were trying to get you started on thinking scientifically. Only physics is simple enough for HS students to do that.
e.g., To students who don’t know the Coriolis Force, meteorology is just a list of facts to memorize. It’s not science.
@futurebird @Twarda seems more geared to producing “useful” stem workers than advancing science or professional fulfillment.
@futurebird @Twarda Oh my God—you’re right! I’ve lamented for a long time my early decision not to study biology more deeply, and 10th grade was the turning point, when I took physics instead.
@futurebird @Twarda If it helps, I took IB biology in high school, but never learned that, or a million other things. There's just so /much/ *waves hands at it all*
Also really cool is that some huge milestone discoveries in biology were made /after/ you and I went to high school, so there's still so much to learn regardless!