Week 9: Natural Selection

 This week, the questions that we were focused on were: Why do organisms have so many similarities and yet so many differences? What makes a bird a bird? 

To investigate those questions, we created a model of natural selection. We used beans and had a predator prey on the beans. We used a spoon as a bird beak and the environment was water. We had two different types of beans, one that floats and one that didn't float. In the model, the beans that didn't float were more likely to survive and were able to reproduce more than the ones that floated. We changed the model and used tweezers as the beak. That changed the simulation to make the beans that floated more likely to  float. The model was a good representation of natural selection because there were two different traits, and one was more likely to survive and then more likely to reproduce children with the same traits.

We also watched a video about the ancestors of birds. It turns out that birds are actually a relative of dinosaurs. It was interesting to see evolution throughout the video and how we went from the large dinosaurs to the birds we think about today.

One question I still have is, now that we know that birds have evolve from dinosaurs, how did so many different breeds come about.