Examining ATI Wisdom Booklets: Booklet 2: Science-ish – Disciplines Of Science

Biology:
- When did Adam learn the characteristics of animals? I remember him naming them (and the awesome Simpsons Bible Stories where Homer named everything “Land Monster”, “Tree Monster” etc.), but not embarking on a study of their parts.
- The ATI definition of biology seems to be “the study of plants and animals”. The problem is that the actual definition of biology is “the study of life”. That means ATI is missing:
  - Biochemistry
  - Cellular Biology
  - Anatomy/Physiology (covered partially in the Medicine section)
  - Fungal, protozoal and bacterial organism study (this is where plants and animals fit)
  - Population dynamics
  - Community level interactions
  - Ecosystem level interactions
  - Biosphere level interactions
- I knew that ATI had character studies used to bash women from the Bible. Do they have animal character studies as well?
Evolution:
- Nearly every sentence in that section is wrong.
- ATI shares an extremely common misconception that evolution moves from less complicated to more complicated systems. That’s not true. Evolution can move in that direction, but can also move from more complicated system to less complicated systems.
  - Examples:
    - Loss of sight in cave-dwelling organisms
    - Loss of chlorophyll in parasitic plants
  - I’m not going to penalize them as much as I usually would because that misconception is common among undergraduate science majors.
- I am going to take MAJOR points away for implying that “all life comes from tiny cells” is a false statement. All living things are made of cells. To humans, all living things are made of tiny cells.
- Evolution is not a replacement for religion; it is an explanation that unites a wide range of biological phenomena.
- I love how ATI teaches people to parrot deep-sounding arguments without doing the background work needed to understand the arguments. Case-in-point: Evolution is disproved by thermodynamics.
  - The first law of thermodynamics is that energy cannot be created or destroyed within an isolated system but instead is converted to different sources.
    - I have no idea how this is supposed to disprove evolution. In the ecosystem level studies ATI skipped, high school students would normally learn about energy pyramids. Biological systems obey the first law of thermodynamics since energy taken in from any source is either converted into chemical energy (e.g., used to maintain or build tissues) or lost as heat or chemical wastes.
  - The second law of thermodynamics states that isolated systems over time gain entropy which is a fancy way of saying that chaos increases over time if nothing is added to the system.
    - This is supposed to disprove evolution because “evolution says things get more complicated and thermodynamics says everything will fall apart over time!”
    - The problem is that living organisms by definition add energy to their system. Humans add energy by eating; plants add energy through photosynthesis. Since energy is being added to the system, the second law of thermodynamics is still true.
    - Clearly, the second law of thermodynamics holds true after an organism dies. In the absence of energy input, the dead organism decays – or gains entropy.
- Evolution has been proved so many times that it’s not even funny. Scientists have demonstrated decreasing frequency of sickle-cell anemia carriers among African-Americans in the USA compared to Western Africa in response to decreased malaria pressure. MRSA and other antibiotic resistant bacteria – that’s evolution in action as well.

Go back Continue Reading

Examining ATI Wisdom Booklets: Booklet 2: Science-ish – Disciplines of Science