For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here.

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here.

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here.

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here.

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here.

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here.

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Get the full transcript here.

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Chapter 3: The Kingdoms of Archaea and Bacteria Part 2: Let's Play - Are You Alive? Virus Edition

You might be wondering about another part of creation – viruses. I’m sure you have heard of these little buggers that cause the flu and coronavirus (among many other diseases). Viruses are extremely small parts of creation (even smaller than bacteria) that can infect any type of living thing. But are they themselves alive? As you might recall, living things all do seven things – get energy, excrete, respire (breathe), grow, reproduce, react to their environment, and move; additionally, living things have cells. Let’s consider if viruses do what creatures do.

A virus is a piece of DNA wrapped in a protein shell rather than being cells like bacteria. When they enter your body, they can move around and find the kind of cells that they are looking to infect. They enter the cell and cause the machinery in the cell to make more viruses. The viruses then go on to infect more cells until, of course, your immune system comes to the rescue (more on that later).

So, how did viruses do? They do have sensitivity and movement and they do grow and reproduce (although not on their own), but they do not get energy, excrete, or have respiration, nor are they made of cells. For these reasons, scientists generally do not think that viruses are living things, but we will see them again in the Commons of Creation.

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Chapter 3: The Kingdoms of Archaea and Bacteria Part 2: Terra Incognita and More Familiar Lands

Now that the younger students are busy with their microscopes, we can dig in a little deeper. Let’s consider this E. coli. But which kingdom does this creature belong to? It’s kinda hard to tell. Nearly all the residents of these two kingdoms, they are unicellular – made of just one cell. If we could zoom inside those cells, we would see that they are different from our own: archaea and bacteria all lack a nucleus, the part of our cells where the DNA is stored, making them prokaryotes. These two kingdoms are so similar that wee only know that E. coli belongs in the Kingdom of Bacteria because we have looked at its DNA! At the genetic level (having to do with DNA), these two kingdoms are very different, diverged by the Creator so that together they could fill every nook and cranny of our world.

Even though we know more about these two kingdoms that we used to, don’t get the idea that we know a whole lot. I mean, just check out this atlas for the Kingdom of Archaea – half of it is labeled terra incognita and covered with dragons and itty-bitty sea monsters. Makes sense though – it’s not so easy to find archaea since they live in places that are likely to kill us. We have, though, explored parts of two phyla (regions). One includes some of the most famous archaea that live in the deep ocean, often around the exceedingly hot thermal vents, whiling away the hours turning chemicals into food. The other phyla is more diverse, including archaea that live in extremely hot environments (up to 122ºC – well over the boiling point of water!), salty environments, as well as in the intestines of cows, in fresh water, and in soil.

The atlas of the Kingdom of Bacteria, on the other hand, (BANG!) is much more substantial: there are over 40,000 known species of bacteria in the world. A quarter of those might just be ones that live on people. But let me tell you, even though this puppy is quite hefty, a lot of the pages are blank, just waiting to be filled with newly discovered species. Nowadays, scientists usually organize bacteria into 30 phyla based on their DNA, but there are some more traditional ways of organizing them.

One early type of classification used gram staining in a process discovered by a Danish doctor named Hans Christian Gram. Like many scientific breakthroughs, gram staining was discovered through close observation, a lot of hard work, and a bit of luck. Dr. Gram was studying lung cells from patients with pneumonia. He put a stain called crystal violet on the tissue and, to his surprise, the bacteria in the samples seemed to soak up the stain! Even when he tried to rinse the stain away, some of the bacteria still stayed the purple color. Some of the bacteria, though, went back to their original appearance, leaving two groups. Another scientist might have done this same thing before and never realized the significance, but Dr. Gram saw that this was a way of differentiating types of bacteria into gram-positive (they keep the purple color) and gram-negative (they don’t).

Maybe you’re not to into liquids that can stain your clothes. Scientists still have you covered with autotrophic bacteria (they produce their own food) versus heterotrophic bacteria (they eat their food). Most autotrophic bacteria get their energy from the sun, so a lot of them are found on the ocean surface (incidentally, you can thank those guys for about half of the world’s oxygen). Heterotrophic bacteria are a bit more...complicated. I mean, they have to get their food from somewhere, so some of them are predators, eating other microorganisms, but a lot of them eat parts of much bigger creatures. Like, well, us. Hang on, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Those friendly bacteria, they’re symbiotic: they eat some of our food, but they also help us out. Bacteria help out all kind of creatures, like the ones like live on the roots of bean plants; the bean plants feed the bacteria and the bacteria produces ammonia, an important chemical without which the plant cannot grow. And yes, there are some that are pathogens that cause diseases like acne or stomach bugs or Lyme disease. Those are seriously a bummer, but modern medicine has given us antibiotics – courtesy of friendly bacteria that produce these chemicals in their continual wars. Some friendly bacteria actually eat us, too. Well, our dead cells, anyway. The decomposers help to rid the world of all debris, from roadkill to autumn leaves, acting as the world’s janitor to keep everything clean.

Bacteria do some pretty amazing things in our world, and we have only scratched the surface. Scientists are constantly finding new species, helping to learn more about creation and about the Creator, and maybe providing antibiotics that could help save lives in the future. But much of this Kingdom is still uncharted – adventure awaits!

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Chapter 3: The Kingdoms of Archaea and Bacteria - Part 1: A Visit to the Tiny Kingdoms

Welcome one and all to the Grand Tour where you will see the sights and sounds, the thrills and chills of all the kingdoms. Over the next several weeks, you will get to visit creatures from the tiny to the towering, the floral and the fierce. Once you step aboard the Grand Tour you will be whisked away to meet creatures never before seen by boys and girls, hidden in the depths of the ocean and the darkest rain forests, if you are up for the adventure…

This week we will start our tour in the two kingdoms made entirely of microorganisms (those too small to be seen with the naked eyed: the Kingdoms of Archaea (ar-kay-uh) and Bacteria. Hey you, in the back, did you say they are boring? Well, that is where you are wrong. You might not be able to see them, but they can certainly see you. And without them, you wouldn’t last a day. So, what do you say? Are in for the trip of a lifetime to see all the life that there is to see?

Before we can begin, I must acquaint you with your tools for this part of the trip: a microscope. This handy tool uses lenses like those found in eye glasses to magnify our friends so that we can see them. Amazingly, in all of human history, the microscope was only invented about 450 years ago. Imagine that you might have been a medieval scholar or a Roman soldier or a worker on the pyramids and not known a thing about this part of creation. What a privilege it is to live at a time when we can behold so many wonders of the Creator!

Hop on board our robin (or you can choose the toucan), and let’s fly over to those kingdoms. First, we leave behind the villages of the Kingdom of Animals, teeming with life; soar over the Kingdom of Plants, verdant and peaceful; and then we spy in the distance two seemingly empty kingdoms. We see the fence around these two kingdoms with some lakes (one of them does appear to be a strange rainbow color), but otherwise there appears to be nothing.

How strange, you might say to yourself, but then you remember your microscope! As you zoom in, closer and closer to one of those lakes or the soil or even the air itself, you will see millions and billions and trillions of archaea and bacteria, nearly all of which are just one cell all by itself.

The Kingdom of the Archaea is filled with extreme environments, from the saltiest lakes to one that are boiling hot. Part of the kingdom is freezing cold, while another is as dry as the most arid deserts. There are wastelands of toxic sludge and radioactive chemicals. In each of these, vast numbers of archaea are found, living cozy little lives in the homes that are just right for these extremophiles. Some archaea do live in more moderate environments, such as bogs or cow intestines or the ocean, but these archaea often do strange things like live without oxygen or eat oil or make their own food from chemicals rather than sunlight. Many new archaea are found every year because they live in such surprising places, including the most astonishing place of all – your own backyard (which is a strange place to find something that we usually see in the deepest, darkest ocean)!

Next up on our Tour, we will fly on over to the Kingdom of Bacteria, a much more notorious lot, to be sure. I bet you have gotten sick from one of these little buggers before and had to take an antibiotic. It certainly is true that many germs are bacteria, but the vast majority of bacteria are not harmful to humans. As we said earlier, many are our friends. If you like bread, cheese, or yogurt, you can thank bacteria. You have more bacteria in and on your body than you have cells in your body, and it is a good thing, too, because they help protect you from germs. Like two armies facing off, the friendly bacteria and the germs fight for control. If you want to keep your bacteria army healthy and strong, be sure to maintain a healthy diet.

Take some time with your microscopes to explore this hidden part of creation!

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Chapter 2: What is a Creature?Part 2: There's a Certain Chemistry to All This Biology

If you have been learning about science very long, you might have taken offense at the idea that our bodies are made of cells. After all, you might say, everything is made out of atoms, so we must be made out of atoms, too. You are absolutely right, everything is made of atoms – extremely tiny particles (even smaller than cells) that bond together to make everything. Atoms come in quite a wide variety of elements, from hydrogen to organesson, and you can look at the periodic table of the elements to see all the different kinds. On it, you will notice that each element has a letter or two that represent it; scientists use this shorthand to talk about elements to save space. For living things, the most important elements are carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen.

Atoms bonded together in different ways form what we call compounds or molecules. Different kinds of compounds are what make the difference between salt (made of sodium and chlorine – NaCl as a chemist might say), sugar (made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen – C12H22O11), and a puppy (made of...well, a lot of different elements, even gold!).

Living things are mostly made of a certain type of compounds known as organic compounds, mostly carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). We also need vitamins, minerals, and water in order to stay healthy.

Wait! I bet you’ve heard of most of those things things before. If you look at almost any food packaging, you will find them listed on the back (go ahead and look, I’ll wait). These different types of compounds are listed there because we get them from food, and in order to stay fit it is important that we get them in the right amounts.

So what do all of those fancy words mean? Carbohydrates are a type of compound that is made of carbon (C) and water (H2O – hydrogen and oxygen). Carbohydrates are great for short-term energy storage (in sugars and starches) and providing structure (in cellulose that allows plants to grow tall). The basic building block of carbohydrates is known as glucose (C6H12O6); glucose molecules link up with one another to form chains of molecules. The longer the chain, the more complex the compound is and the longer it takes to digest. So, if it’s going to be a while before you can eat again, reach for the complex carbs in the oatmeal rather than the simple carbs in the doughnut.

Proteins are perhaps the most diverse group of organic molecules. They are made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and occasionally sulfur. They provide structure (such as the cartilage in your ears), allow movement (through muscles), facilitate communication (with insulin in your blood), and many other things. The basic building block of proteins are called amino acids. When these amino acids are built into chains of proteins inside a cell, an absolutely amazing thing happens: what starts out as a squiggly string, folds and forms itself into an almost inconceivably complex shape. Even a small mistake in the folding will make the protein ineffective and even dangerous. This protein folding is so complex that scientists often cannot predict how a protein will fold, yet they automatically do it every day inside the cells of every creature on Earth.

Fats, or more precisely lipids, are made of carbon, hydrogen, and sometimes oxygen. Fats are often shunned in diets because of their amazing long-term fat storage ability, but it is important that we have a healthy amount of fat in our diets. Lipids often form cell membranes (the “wall” around a cell), and many hormones in our bodies are also made of lipids, including cortisol and estrogen, sending messages around the body. Fats are also important in helping us to get some of the vitamins that we need, since some can only be found there.

On the food package, you will also find a whole list of vitamins and minerals. These are both things that our bodies need that we can’t produce ourselves, everything from calcium to Vitamin E. Minerals are not organic compounds, and are often just single elements (magnesium, iron); vitamins, on the other hand, are organic compounds. Both are necessary in the right amounts to stay healthy.

Now, we come to the molecule that is not on the food package – DNA. It is arguably the most important type of molecule because it is the one that makes us….us. It encodes instructions that our cells read to carry out their jobs. DNA is made of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorous, but these simple elements combine to form the spiral staircase of life. In its twisting ladder, each strand of DNA holds the instructions for a particular creature, and everyone’s sequence is different (unless you happen to be an identical twin). Nearly every cell in your body has a strand of DNA about 6 feet (2 meters) long, but it is twisted up very tightly so that it is only about 6 microns long – that’s 10 times smaller than the thickness of a hair!

We cannot leave our little chemistry excursion without talking about one last molecule: water, that cool stuff to splash in at the lake or to take a bath in or to put in your soup. This substance may seem ordinary, but it is in many ways the elixir of life. Nearly everything in your body happens in water; in fact, even though water is not an organic compound, you are more than half water! Water is so important that it is absolutely essential for life as we know it (which is why scientists are always looking for water on Mars and other planets).

It is deceptively simple – just one oxygen and two hydrogens, but because of how molecules take their shape, it happens to be slightly positive on one side and negative on the other (think – the opposite ends of magnet), a property known as polarity. This means that adjacent water molecules are slightly attracted to each other (again, like two magnets). Polarity is responsible for making water flow, allowing it to creep up flower stems, giving it surface tension, keeping the bottoms of lakes from freezing, and other things that are critical to our world as we know it. Polarity also makes many things dissolve in water, giving us minerals in our water for our health and salt water in our oceans. Without water and its very special property of property of polarity, nothing that we know of would be alive on Earth – it is truly a miraculous molecule.

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Chapter 2: What is a Creature?Part 1: Living or Not Living - That is the Question

In the last chapter, we looked at the Kingdoms of Creation, which include creatures or things that are living. How can you tell if something is living? After all, a palm tree is very different from a panda, but both are living. Fortunately, scientists have considered all the different types of living things – from tiny bacteria to enormous blue whales – and have noticed that they all do many of the same things.

To find some of them out, let’s consider what you do every day since you, after all, are alive (no zombies out there, I hope). You wake up in the morning and take a deep breath of morning air. Breathing, or respiration, is one thing that all living things do. After you make your bed, you go down for breakfast (what would you like to have?). Eating food is how we get energy or nutrition, and all living things need to do this as well; some creatures eat like we do, and others make their own energy.

After helping to clean up from breakfast, you sit down to do your school work. You notice that the sun is in your eyes so you get up and adjust the curtains. You have found two more things common to all creatures – sensitivity to your surroundings and movement. Sensitivity means that you react to something that happens around you, like when a dog perks up her ears at a sound or a fish swims to the surface to get food. Movement is any kind of change of position, from running and jumping, to swimming and branching (even plants move – just wait to find out more!)

After a hearty lunch (and some more nutrition), you remember that you have to clean out your cat’s litter box. It might seem icky, but all living things excrete, or get rid of waste, such as the undesirable things in the litter box or what is in a baby’s diaper. Your cat had kittens a couple of weeks ago, so once your chore is done you hurry to visit them. How big they all are getting! Reproducing (having babies) and growing are the last two things that all living things do.

We can use what living things do in order to figure out if something is alive or not. Consider a hamster – is it alive? It can move and grow, it does respire (breathe) and excrete (that’s why we need to clean the cage!). It needs nutrition from food and water, is sensitive to its environment (it peeks its little head up when you open the cage door), and it can reproduce (although hopeful won’t). It can do all seven things, so a hamster is alive.

What about a river – can it do all the things that living things do? Rivers do move and they can grow over time, but they do not respire, reproduce, or excrete; they are not sensitive to their surroundings; and they do not need food. Two out of seven things? Sorry, a river is not a living thing. That does not mean, of course, that they are not important. Non-living things make up a vital portion of our world. We will see them again in a while when we visit the Commons of Creation, but for now, we will have to bid them adieu.

One other thing that all creatures have in common is that they are made of cells. Cells are the tiny building blocks that make up your body – you have somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 trillion of them (enough that if you put them end-to-end they would wrap around the Earth at least one and half times). They are very small – so small you would have to use a microscope to see them – which is good because imagine how large you would be otherwise!

Cells do all kinds of amazing things, from taking apart the food that you eat to supplying the air to your cells when you breathe to telling your leg when to kick a ball but not your brother. Different types of cells do these different jobs (and many more) in a wonderful, complex dance that keeps you happy and healthy. We will visit these different types of cells as we go further into the Kingdoms of Creation.

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Part 1: A Bird’s Eye View of the Kingdom

[W]e look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.

-2 Corinthians 4:18, KJV

Everything that you can see in this world is a part of creation – that wonderful, terrible, awe-inspiring everything that you can see and hear and smell. There is also a good bit of creation that it is impossible to detect with your senses, a part of an invisible unseen realm of the soul; this is a wonderful part of our universe, but not something that we will talk about here because those things are not science. Science can tell us many wonderful and important things about what we can see or hear or smell or touch in some way, so that is what we will talk about here. Those other things will have to be left for philosophy or religion or perhaps a good book.

The most amazing thing about all that we can sense the world is that they are all orderly. Everything from the rocks and trees to the stars and seas can be organized and understood. How can this be when there are so many different kinds of things in the world? It is so because creation has a Creator – the One who made all of those things. Because the Creator is orderly, He made creation to be orderly as well; because creation is orderly, we can understand how the world works. We, too, are a part of creation – a special creature made by the Creator known as a human.

We are mostly going to talk here about the part of creation that is alive. That is what biology is about – the study of life. What does it mean for something to be alive? That can be a hard question to answer, but we will consider it in the next chapter. For now, all we need to know is that things that are alive are known as creatures.

Before we go any further, I want to introduce you to a fantastical world – the Kingdoms of Creation. Imagine, if you will, a world where there are six kingdoms that live side by side with each other. Each kingdom has creatures of a similar kind: some seem to have almost nothing in them, except maybe some green scum (the Kingdoms of Bacteria, Archaea [ar-kay-uh], and Protists), others are filled with silent citizens (the Kingdoms of Fungi and Plants), while just one is a raucous riot of movement (the Kingdom of Animals).

We are going to look at each of these remarkable kingdoms in turn shortly, but for now, I just want you to get the lay of the land, so to speak. To learn our way around, we will start in the most familiar section, the Kingdom of the Animals. I’m sure you know many animals: fish and bugs and snakes and robins and dogs and guinea pigs and many, many others. How many can you name?

Let’s imagine for a moment that we are on one of those robins (or would you rather be on a toucan?) flying over the Kingdom of the Animals. As you are flying, you would see far below you, a great fence encircling the kingdom because all the animals want others to know that this is their home. All around is beautiful country, with lakes and rocks and green hills, for the animals live in many different types of homes.

Dotted through this land are villages, where similar animals live near one other, with each particular type of animal in its own house. Some of these villages are large, with many houses and particular animals, and some are small. There are even some houses which are all by themselves, but I don’t think that they are lonely since they can go and see the other parts of creation as much as they want.

These villages have the lovely name of families of creatures since all of the animals are closely related. Each particular animal type is what we call a species – dogs are a species. What are we to make of the many different types of dogs, such as the Beagle and the German Shepherd? These are what we call breeds or varieties of the same species. You can think of them as living in different rooms of the same house. I imagine that dogs and cats must have huge mansions to have enough room for all their different breeds! Each kingdom has these villages where similar plants, fungi, or bacteria can live together. Let’s go explore the wonders of creation!

Ready for More?

Part 2: What’s in a Name? A Map of the Kingdom

Or for younger students, continue on to

Chapter 2: What Is a Creature?

For the full curriculum, visit kingdomsofcreation.substack.com

Part 1: A Bird’s Eye View of the Kingdom

[W]e look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.

-2 Corinthians 4:18, KJV

Everything that you can see in this world is a part of creation – that wonderful, terrible, awe-inspiring everything that you can see and hear and smell. There is also a good bit of creation that it is impossible to detect with your senses, a part of an invisible unseen realm of the soul; this is a wonderful part of our universe, but not something that we will talk about here because those things are not science. Science can tell us many wonderful and important things about what we can see or hear or smell or touch in some way, so that is what we will talk about here. Those other things will have to be left for philosophy or religion or perhaps a good book.

The most amazing thing about all that we can sense the world is that they are all orderly. Everything from the rocks and trees to the stars and seas can be organized and understood. How can this be when there are so many different kinds of things in the world? It is so because creation has a Creator – the One who made all of those things. Because the Creator is orderly, He made creation to be orderly as well; because creation is orderly, we can understand how the world works. We, too, are a part of creation – a special creature made by the Creator known as a human.

We are mostly going to talk here about the part of creation that is alive. That is what biology is about – the study of life. What does it mean for something to be alive? That can be a hard question to answer, but we will consider it in the next chapter. For now, all we need to know is that things that are alive are known as creatures.

Before we go any further, I want to introduce you to a fantastical world – the Kingdoms of Creation. Imagine, if you will, a world where there are six kingdoms that live side by side with each other. Each kingdom has creatures of a similar kind: some seem to have almost nothing in them, except maybe some green scum (the Kingdoms of Bacteria, Archaea [ar-kay-uh], and Protists), others are filled with silent citizens (the Kingdoms of Fungi and Plants), while just one is a raucous riot of movement (the Kingdom of Animals).

We are going to look at each of these remarkable kingdoms in turn shortly, but for now, I just want you to get the lay of the land, so to speak. To learn our way around, we will start in the most familiar section, the Kingdom of the Animals. I’m sure you know many animals: fish and bugs and snakes and robins and dogs and guinea pigs and many, many others. How many can you name?

Let’s imagine for a moment that we are on one of those robins (or would you rather be on a toucan?) flying over the Kingdom of the Animals. As you are flying, you would see far below you, a great fence encircling the kingdom because all the animals want others to know that this is their home. All around is beautiful country, with lakes and rocks and green hills, for the animals live in many different types of homes.

Dotted through this land are villages, where similar animals live near one other, with each particular type of animal in its own house. Some of these villages are large, with many houses and particular animals, and some are small. There are even some houses which are all by themselves, but I don’t think that they are lonely since they can go and see the other parts of creation as much as they want.

These villages have the lovely name of families of creatures since all of the animals are closely related. Each particular animal type is what we call a species – dogs are a species. What are we to make of the many different types of dogs, such as the Beagle and the German Shepherd? These are what we call breeds or varieties of the same species. You can think of them as living in different rooms of the same house. I imagine that dogs and cats must have huge mansions to have enough room for all their different breeds! Each kingdom has these villages where similar plants, fungi, or bacteria can live together. Let’s go explore the wonders of creation!

Ready for More?

Part 2: What’s in a Name? A Map of the Kingdom

Or for younger students, continue on to

Chapter 2: What Is a Creature?