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Big History Project
Course: Big History Project > Unit 5
Lesson 1: What Is Life? |5.0- ACTIVITY: DQ Notebook 5.0
- WATCH: Unit 5 Overview - Life
- ACTIVITY: Vocab Tracking
- WATCH: A Big History of Everything - H2
- ACTIVITY: How Closely Related Are We?
- ACTIVITY: Threshold Card — Threshold 5 Life
- WATCH: The Origin of Life
- READ: Life and Purpose
- READ: Gallery — What is Life?
- ACTIVITY: Claim Testing – What Is Life?
- Quiz: What Is Life?
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ACTIVITY: Claim Testing – What Is Life?
Purpose
You’ll use claim testers to ensure you really understand the differences between life and nonlife. Plus, it’s important to keep honing your claim-testing skills.
Process
In this claim-testing exercise, you’re going to make determinations about whether or not claims about living versus nonliving things are true or false.
Think about the following statements:
- All things that move are living things.
- All living things reproduce.
- All nonliving things are manmade.
- All living things are either plants or animals.
Do you agree or disagree with these claims? Why?
For Further Discussion
Pick one claim and decide if you think it’s true or false. Then, in the Questions Area below, explain why you think that claim is true or false (don’t forget to provide the original claim in your post). After that, comment on someone else’s claim and provide evidence that either supports or refutes that person’s assertion.
Want to join the conversation?
1. All things that move are living things. Wrong. Everything moves. Wind, water, the expanding space and time. That's one of the main points of looking at the Big Picture of Big History!(15 votes)
All living things produce. It is true. It is one of the reasons why people are still debating whether viruses are alive or non living.(3 votes)
That isn't necessarily true. Mules are sterile offspring of donkeys and horses, incapable of reproduction. Yet we consider them to be alive.(3 votes)
All non-living things are man-made - FALSE
The elements are not living and not man made (as we've learned), so evidence shows that not all living things are manmade.(3 votes)- Yeah, rocks, the earth is not man-made, Jupiter is not man-made...(3 votes)
All Living things reproduce. I'm not really sure what to think about this on, i feel like this is false but I'm not sure.....(3 votes)
It is true that all living things move, but so does everything else. Photons, lava, dust, and tectonic plates move, but we know these things are not alive. All atoms move, so everything moves, not just life forms.
All living things reproduce and make copies of themselves. If they did not, no life would exist. We don't know of an inanimate object that reproduces (though one could argue that DNA is alive by that logic). Mules are considered alive even though they can't reproduce, and so are viruses.
Life appeared late in the history of the universe. Since humans are living things, we could not have been there to construct stars and planets and even the whole universe, even if that was possible. Also, there is a paradox if we assume we were there: who made us? Where were we?
The first living organisms were prokaryotes, a form of bacteria, and many of them are still here.
A. FALSE
B. Unsure
C. FALSE
D. FALSE(3 votes)
It is false that all non-living things are manmade because take a rock for instance. A rock isn't manmade, we don't make them in factories or laboratories, they are made from various different things, such as, sedimentation and weathering. Therefore, I completely disagree with the statement that "All nonliving things are manmade."(3 votes)
Even though protons, lava, dust and so on may not be alive in many people's eyes, they do have traces of living particulars in those things such as human cells, and bacteria and such on. And also many people believe that plants are not living because they dont reproduce or because they dont have a brain and they ARE WRONG! Because plants may not have a nervous system and they may not have a brain but they do make clones of themselves which is very much like reproducing. Plants are living because you must water them and make sure they have the right amount of anything and if they dont then they can die just like humans and most importantly they have to have love, love is the key to everything in life, if you put a plant in a non loving environment studies have shown that they will die. So everything and everyone needs love.(3 votes)
I think the claim that all things are either plants or animals is not true. I base my claim on the existence do viruses and bacteria. Both forms of life of which are not grouped in either the plant or animal kingdom.(2 votes)
Yes its false. In the tree of life there are five kingdoms- Protists, Monera, Fungi, Plantae and Animalia. Plants and animals make up only two of these kingdoms.(0 votes)
- These some old as comments(1 vote)
~All things that move are living things.
~ Disagree, things can move by being pushed with force that are not living.
~All living things reproduce.
~Agree, if living things didn't reproduce, that species would no longer exist.
~All nonliving things are man made.
~Disagree, rocks and minerals are nonliving and not man made.
~All living things are either plants or animals.
~Disagree, bacteria and other one celled organisms are neither plant nor animal.(0 votes)
What about mules? (They don't reproduce)(3 votes)