Teaching Biology to My Kids
For Easter, I cracked open Scott Freeman’s classic textbook, Evolutionary Analysis, and found a nice graphic of the HIV virus’ replication strategy for discussion with my kids, 8, 8, and 2.85.
Andrew kept asking who made the virus, and why, and I was trying to explain that nobody made the virus, it evolved from other viruses. The entire discussion gave the event—the evolution of a novel-to-humans coronavirus that succeeds particularly well at catching on human throat cells—far too much prominence, as if something unique and bad had happened in the world. I wanted him to understand that nothing new had happened, the same thing that always happens had happened. Things are always making more of themselves that are a little different.
This boy born 5.5 months into marriage then asks “but why do things make more of themselves?”
I looked around for something shaped like a molecule and found the mini magnetic balls they got for Christmas. Did my best to approximate how one brainless thing can cause the shape of other brainless things to change through its inherent properties: A rod of mini balls reorganizes other local loose magnetic balls. The entire set pops suddenly into a circle.
Then I squished the circle into two adjacent rods and split it down the center. “See, it just made another one of itself from those loose pieces, and now both pieces make more of themselves in the same way.”
The photo in the textbook helpfully had little DNA strands that looked like our magnetic mini balls, and I showed the kids how the bag of magnets locks onto the outside of a cell, dumps its magnets into the cell, and then makes more magnets inside the cell, before sending out bags of magnets to make more magnet copies.
Vivian points at the exterior proteins on the HIV virus, equivalent to where you find the Crown-shaped proteins that give Coronaviruses their name, and says “I thought these were the magnets.”
“They are. There are magnets all over the place on viruses.”
So now my kids thing that we are being attacked by a bunch of magnets, which is basically true.