Real-Life Communication
Ecologists need to be able to communicate clearly and tailor their
message to the right audience. "You really have to understand who you are
talking to," says Matthew Hunter, a consulting wildlife ecologist. "In one
audience, you want to speak with simpler terms. And with others, you get more
technical."
You are an ecologist who has been invited to speak to a
high school biology class.
You decide to talk to them about the Gaia
theory. You want to brush up on it, so you go to the Internet and find this:
The
Gaia theory, generally speaking, suggests that the Earth is analogous to a
living organism, or a "super-organism." That is, the biosphere is like a living
system that has self-correcting feedback systems, much like a living cell,
plant or animal.
In its more sophisticated form, the Gaia theory suggests
that there are levels of organization (subcellular, cellular, organs, tissues,
organism, population and biosphere) and that biological causality occurs between
all these levels.
Following from this assumption is the idea that strict
reductionism -- reducing systems to the levels of physics and chemistry --
will never sufficiently explain life. Life has "emergent properties" that
only appear at these levels of interaction. They disappear when reduced to
their component parts.
The Gaia theory is a young theory. It is sometimes
criticized because, in its most cartoonish form, it can seem mystical. It
is too early to determine whether it will stand the test of time,
like Darwin's theory of evolution via natural selection. A good theory generates
hypotheses that can be tested. If these tests generally support the theory,
the theory lives on. If the tests don't support the theory, it gets left behind.
You
understand the above passage, since you're a trained scientist. Yet you figure
the students might like some analogies to help them understand the Gaia theory
better. You decide to list three ways how the "living organism of the Earth"
is similar to the students' own "living organism" -- their own bodies.