The Biologic Podcast

A brief introduction to ecology, including the relationship between  organism & physical environment, the relationships between organisms, and the geochemical nutrient cycling that sustains the biosphere.

The viruses are pathogenic conglomerations of biomolecules, existing somewhere in the ambiguous void between true life, and unliving physical chemistry. Some say the viruses are not alive, others say they are the oldest branch on the tree of life...

The animals are dynamic biochemical superstructures; they are mobile food-processing tubes, equipped with a variety of appendages and morphologies adapted to a particular habitat & ecological niche.

The fungus are the quiet decomposers, playing a critical role in the recycling of biomatter. Without fungus to break down dead biomass and return those nutrients to the wild, the biosphere would collapse.

The plants are photosynthetic organisms, capable of turning the raw energy in sunlight into biological chemicals, which then sustains the entire food chain with carbon & nutrients.

The protista are a diverse group of organisms, including both single celled and multicellular species. From an evolutionary perspective, they are the bridge between bacteria, and complex macroscopic life.

A brief introduction into the diversity of life, beginning with the oldest lineages on Earth; the Archaea & Bacteria.

In the presence of Human development and pollution, and extreme climate change, what does the future hold for the evolution of Earth life?

The Holocene marks the most recent ~10,000 years of natural history, including the rise of Human civilization and the wholesale transformation of the Earths surface.

The Cenozoic Era began with the destruction of the dinosaurs, and would see the rise to dominance and wild diversification of the birds and the mammals, including the emergence of a curious primate species.

The Mesozoic Era saw the evolutionary emergence and rise to dominance of the dinosaurs, and the emergence of early bird and mammal ancestors.

The Paleozoic Era saw the rapid emergence of increasingly complex life forms that filled the sea and the land, but they would all face extinction during the events known as the Great Dying.

Life on Earth is billions of years old. This ancient natural history comes to us in the form of fossils and genetic relationships, revealing the incredible story of the evolution of life.

All populations are subject to perpetual evolution, and Humans are no exception; peer into our distant past and observe the evolutionary history of the Human species.

As all living things are fundamentally related, phylogenetics is the study of these genetic relationships, and the evolutionary history of the many diverse lineages of Earthly life.

When populations groups diverge, whether they're separated geographically, temporally, or behaviorally, they find themselves on the pathway to speciation.

Besides natural selection, evolution is influenced by mechanisms like gene flow, the random walk of genetic drift, and the novelty-generating phenomenon of genetic mutations.

The forces of natural selection remove from the gene pool those lineages too unfit to survive in a given habitat, while those with good health survive to make healthy offspring, and their lineages tend to perpetuate.

A brief introduction to evolution, including its mechanisms, selective pressures, runaway effects, and the fundamental importance of evolution as a guiding force for the perpetuation of life.

Genetic information is complex; there's the gene sequence, the regulation of gene expression, and there are even mechanisms to modify genes, allowing a single gene to produce multiple different proteins.

The gene itself encodes raw information, but this is just the beginning of gene expression, which is a complex, highly-regulated, and tightly-coordinated process.

New DNA molecules are generated through a complex replication process, and mutations can be repaired with a variety of mechanisms.

The genome encodes information to 'build' the organism; the process of transcription encodes the DNA information into RNA, and translation encodes the information into polypeptide chains, which form proteins.

Meiosis is a specialized form of cellular replication, which creates many haploid daughter cells, each possessing a single copy of the genome.

A brief introduction to genetics, including the structure of DNA and RNA, gene expression, genome replication, and more.