Cos I’m that ownage at bio! Well actually I suck, so yeh, take these notes with a grain of salt and citations are needed for everything unless otherwise stated.
First matter:
Darwin’s Theory of Evolution or Natural Selection or whatever you want to call it
Basically some smartass called Darwin travelled around the world and co-incidently went to the somethingorother-gas Islands where he found that stuff was like totally different to everywhere else. Some other guy also did something to do with it but no one cares about him because Darwin was more popular or something. By the way, you didn’t need to know that.
So how it works is as follows:
- Due to the chaos theory, or whatever you want to believe, not every member within a species is identical in terms of genetics and traits. (It’s probably too late to tell you this, but if you click that Wikipedia link you may get trapped for a good hour or 2 link clicking)
- Thanks to the environment which may also vary for some reason or another, some variations in the species allow them to survive better
- Since they can survive better, they get to have more sex and have more babies (and vice versa for the environmental suckers)
- Eventually that environment will be overrun by members of the species with the more ownage characteristics
- Done
Some other theory states that some random individual in the species had some “inner will” and they magically changed some of their characteristics to be more favourable in the environment they are in. That’s total bullshit and it’s no wonder it was never accepted.
Why… questions
The answer will almost always be “water conservation” or “energy conservation”. Not forgetting “surface area to volume ratio”.
Photosynthesis
Chloroplast is very important. It also needs carbon dioxide and you’re probably meant to know the equation for it but I forgot. TODO: go back and write the equation here.
Mitosis
- Chromosomes duplicate
- Chromosomes line up
- Cell splits
- ???
- Profit
Meiosis
- Chromosomse duplicate
- Chromosomes line up
- Cell splits
- Cell splits
- Profit
And apparantly you don’t need to know the whateverphases, so we’re all good.
Life on Earth
Hopefully you still remember it from earlier in the year, because I don’t.
Stuff before Life on Earth
Hopefully you still remember it, because I don’t, but fortunately it’s not needed.
Sexual Encounters of a Floral Kind
It was a seriously great VHS, and I want to archive it in Blu-Ray quality.
Basically you have to remember that the stigma, the style and the ovary are the female parts. (Make sure you get it right, because I keep getting stigma and stamen mixedup). Anther and filament are the male parts, collectively known as the stamen.
Apparantly plants can incest and they don’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with it, but the male and female are mature at different times to try to prevent that. You don’t need to know that.
So there are 2 main ways to get the male part of one flower to the female part of another. I’m sure there are exceptions where the reverse occurs but I don’t know any.
- Wind
- “Pollenators”
For wind pollenated plants, under a microscope you can see that the pollen is like spiky so it can easily stick to stuff. That was something you probably did need to know, since they will probably ask questions on practicals to screw over people that didn’t pay attention in practicals. Basically, wind pollenation advantages are:
- Energy saving (see, I told you this would be the answer to everything) because it doesn’t need fancy flowers to attract picky pollenators
- No need for pollenators
Disadvantage(s):
- Very small chance of pollen actually landing somewhere useful (though I beg to differ, since it successfully gets up my nose quite often). Just think of the inverse square law, kinetic particle theory, or whatever other equivalent.
I’m now only 200 words from this being longer than my English essay. 
Bascially with plants that need pollenation by “pollenators”, it does all this fancy energy consuming stuff to attract “pollenators” so that they can get their pollen all over them. (I’m sure you can draw your own parallel for this (; ). Some examples of the attractive stuff it does:
- Nice odour (to the pollenators, sometimes to humans as well, not that humans are necessarily not pollenators)
- Free food
- Nice colour
———— I’m gonna continue after I take a shower.
When I finished showering I got distracted my MSN, IRC and some other crap. I don’t feel like doing any more on this now…
OK so disadvantage of pollenator requiring plants:
- Wastes energy
And now onto…
Asexual Encounters of a Floral Kind
BOOOOOOOOORING!…
is what I would be saying if someone actually decided to make a video with this name.
Basically a plant sprouts new bits of itself in varying places and becomes a seperate plant.
- Bulbs. Think onion…
- Stolon. Think, the ground is stealing a part of the old plant.
- Runners. Like a stolon, but the original plant specifically sprouts out new bits for the ground to steal.
- Rhizome. No idea. Just think ginger. Delicious.
- Suckers. Err… new bits come from the base of the old plant, go out sideways and go up. (I can’ t be bothered with a diagram)
- Stem tuber. An underground stem with a massive chunk of shit on it.
- Root tuber. Same thing, except that it’s the root.
This worksheet I’m using as reference asked why weeds are so successful. Answer: because they‘re ownage reproduce by asexual means, which are very fast.
Also, humans like this because they won’t get any variations of the food which are yucky, since each plant would be identical.
Continental Drift
Stuff moved, climate change, environment change.
Evidence: fitting continental shelves, similar fossils, etc.
Good/bad? Doesn’t matter.
EDIT: I just found a sheet that says that continental drift causes geographic isolation which prevents gene flow (read: sex) between the seperated groups, therefore they will evolve differently over time.
Megafauna
Sucks to be them. They died due to either
- Ill
- Kill
- Chill
(in order of the number of letters in the word). Apparantly just writing the word in the exam will get your zerox marks, so you need to explain it. Taking the first one as an example: Those evil evil humans brough disease beacase they decided to migrate everywhere and sneeze on everything they saw. Evidence is that there are human fossils of a similar age and location to megafauna fossils.
Classification
All classification systems are arbitary, which means the maker of them randomly bullshitted up some criteria and put on the fancy label of “classification system”. Main criteria in ye olden daiz are appearance and physical features, but thanks to some technology, we now use some chemical thing since we think it’s less subjective or something.
Hierarchy (commonly accepted because we’re stupid): Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. (KPCOFGS: Keep Pond Clean or (Ice)Frog Gets Sick). You probaby didn’t need to memorise that, but thanks to Google/UrbanDictionary for the mnemonic.
Dichotomus keys are the best cos they’re totally unabigious, but making them are a pain in the ass, but luckily we will only have to make a really simple one, if any, in the exam.
OK, that’s it, I need sleep. Good luck and have fun for tomorrow!
