Redpoll (Was Common Redpoll) Photo Fyn Kynd, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Dear Readers, 10th September is the day when my new Open University course opens online (it doesn’t officially start until October but I do like to get ahead). Last year was mainly Environmental Science, but this year I’m back to Biology, and very interesting it looks too.

First up is speciation – what makes a species, and how do you define it? You might think this is straightforward – after all, if two individuals can mate and have viable offspring who can reproduce and have offspring of their own, surely that’s enough? Well, I won’t know the full answer to that for a while, but I do know that, based on genetic evidence, three former species of a little finch called the Lesser Redpoll, Common Redpoll and Arctic Redpoll are now considered to be just one species, causing head-scratching amongst birdwatchers who had previously been happy to have three ticks on their life-list, and now have just one. Then we turn to plants, which are even more full of confusion – in the dandelions there are no less than 70 microspecies, for example. I suspect that in a few weeks time I will be returning to this subject, which grows less clear by the second.

Then we pile into various genetic-based subjects – how does variation within and between species happen? How does evolution take place? How far do genes determine destiny, and how much depends on how the proteins that genes code for are expressed?

And finally, we’re back to the life cycle of the cell, and the mechanisms of ageing. It’s all going to be fairly mind-blowing, and I absolutely cannot wait. I shall be musing about some of the topics here, and hopefully getting to grips with some of the trickier topics in biology. Plus, I do believe there’s another chance to offer different-coloured doughballs to the magpies in the garden, who will no doubt be delighted. You can read about that particular experiment here and here and also here. No doubt this time the analysis will be taken up a notch, but I’m up for it! Let the brain-stretching commence!