Tyler Griggs

Term Summary/Reflections
When I was registering for my classes at freshman orientation, I really didnt
think much about the Freshman Inquiry class, until my orientation mentor that I was
assigned told me that we would be in the same class all year. This made me really think
about what FRINQ class I wanted to take, since I would be with the same people every
Tuesday and Thursday for nine months. After going through my options, I figured out
that Life Unlimited was the class that I wanted to take. When I first saw the description of
the class, and it was a mix of content that I somewhat knew already, with some new
concepts that I was interested in learning about.
Day one rolls around and the first thing that was put on the board was a question;
a question that everyone has probably asked at least once in their lives, but no one has
ever gotten a straight answer to: What is life? Sure you could say that its a living,
breathing organism that eats or whatever, but no matter what we said, the Professor was
able to come up with a counter example to shoot us down. At this point, it was clear that
we needed to do some research and readings to come up with a somewhat clear definition
to life. We were assigned a book called Lifes Ratchet, by Peter M. Hoffman, and its a
240 or so paged book full of complicated text that basically explains the mechanisms of
life, and how they are able to function in their own tiny universe full of chaotic
movement and randomness. These machines are somehow able to harness this chaos and
use it to their advantage, creating these little machines that are able to carry out certain
functions in our cells that allow us to live. The book starts out relatively slow and easy,
talking about many philosophers and scientists from the 15th and 16th centuries, all the
way up to more modern day scientists like Charles Darwin. All of the scientists theories
from way back when were advanced upon and their methods were carried out and tested
by the modern day scientists. The book then moves into nano-machines and how the
many trillions of them in our bodies are able to collaborate together to create, well, life.
For example, ribonucleic acid (RNA) is an ancestral version of what we know today as
deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and certain parts of RNA are able to break the hydrogen
bonds, copy, and paste, and reattach the hydrogen bonds in the DNA, and create new
DNA molecules that go into the nucleus of our cells. The complexity of the text was
astonishing and it was by far the most challenging thing Ive ever read in my entire life.
Each week we would come together in our main sessions and discuss the chapter
of the book we were assigned to read, while us students would sit glazed-eyed and try to
comprehend everything that the Professor was trying to throw at us. Some students brave
enough to come up with a theory would generally be countered by the Professor, and this
lead to some very interesting debates. These debates were able to help us come up with
parts of our definition to what life actually is, and each class we were able to slowly but
surely add on mere sentences to a definition that, no matter what was in it, would
probably still be wrong anyway.
Along with the book, our other main focus was on a computer program called
Avida-ED, which was an evolution simulator or sorts. The basic concept was that we
start with an ancestor organism, and we can start with however many wed like,
depending on how big our petri dish was. We could examine the genomes of each
individual organism to see the steps that the single organism took to produce an
offspring. We could set mutation rates of these individual steps as well. These mutations

Tyler Griggs
could be beneficial to the organism, helping it reproduce faster, or it could even kill the
organism, which is bad. The organisms themselves were rewarded with CPU time, and
this time was allocated by how much RAM the software itself used, so the program
wouldnt totally eat your computer. If that were the case, I wouldnt allow such an
abomination of a program to inhabit my computer in the first place. Doing simple
mathematical equations rewarded the organisms. The equation equose rewarded the most
CPU time. This equation was the most difficult for the organisms to solve, so we would
have to constantly change mutation rates and start over in order to get to equose as fast as
possible. Overall, the program was easy to learn, and hard to master, simply because of
the randomness that was involved, but anyone thats very intrigued by genomes and
evolution could easily lose countless hours into the program.
With the complex readings, the debates, and Avida-ED, we were able to come up
with a somewhat solid answer for the question that had been melting our minds for weeks
and weeks: What is life? Well, heres the simple answer: Life is a set of interactions
between molecules that work together to create self-sustaining organisms, either single
celled or multi-cellular. These interactions include the fortuitous use of thermal energy,
and more predictable capitalization of food energy. Life arises through evolution, i.e. a
process of natural selection caused by adaptive mutations in a reproducing population.
Thats it. We spent 3 months coming up with an answer to such a simple sounding
question. And the most disheartening part is that its still wrong. We may never know an
exact answer to what life is, but thats the fascinating part of this question. Theres
always time to be spent to try to find an answer. Did I learn something in the class? Well
yeah, more than I thought I ever could in 3 short months, and the best part is, theres still
two more terms.

UNST Goals
During my time at Portland State, I will be required to take a Sophomore Inquiry
Class, a Junior Cluster, and a Senior Capstone. All of these classes are relatively
intertwined and are part of the University Studies Program (UNST). There are four goals
of the UNST program: Communication, which is the main focus this year, inquiry and
critical thinking, diversity of the human experience, and ethics combined with social
responsibility. This program is not only trying to teach us the basic reading, writing,
science, and history skills that we need, but its also teaching us about life in general.
This Life Unlimited Course has focused a lot on communication, as well as
inquiry and critical thinking, so I cannot really elaborate on diversity and ethics. As far as
communication is concerned, our mentor sessions and the debates in main session helped
the most. In our mentor sessions, we have 12 people from our main session, and we stay
with those same 12 people throughout the year, and this helps create new friendships and
bonds with people that we may not have otherwise interacted with. These bonds make
small group discussions a whole hell of a lot easier, because instead of sitting there
awkwardly and silently when the professor forces us into small random groups, we find
ourselves contributing meaningful topics and ideas to the discussion.
Critical Thinking and Inquiry is another big focus in this class, hence the name
Freshman Inquiry. The book that we read, as mentioned earlier, took an in depth look at

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the micro machines that actually create and sustain life itself. The level of detail and the
mathematics and theories were some of the most complicated concepts that Ive ever read
about. I dont even think Spark Notes could make summaries of the chapters. Even before
we read the book, the professor put questions on the board that had no correct answer
whatsoever, which led to some people coming up with crazy ideas, and those ideas would
clash with other ideas, and thus some relatively heated debates were had. I can guarantee
that the debates we had in the first term wont be the last ones either. The debates are one
of the core parts of the class, and it really makes us think critically and question topics in
a new way, and thats how were able to relate to the UNST goal of critical thinking.