Group items tagged

Assume that there were salamanders living in some grasslands. Suppose, Lamarck argued, that these salamanders had a hard time walking because their short legs couldn't trample the tall grasses or reach the ground. Suppose that these salamanders began to slither on their bellies to move from place to place. Because they didn't use their legs, the leg muscles wasted away from disuse and the legs thus became small.

passed this acquired trait

Darwin disliked school

no legs.

by inheriting the acquired characteristic of

Darwin's Background

o have extraordinary talents.

genius, did not at first appear

legless salamanders evolved

d observing birds and collecting insects to study.

sent to medical school in Scotland

"intolerably dull

interested in attending natural history lectures.

university at Cambridge, England, in 1827.

Darwin be chosen for the position of naturalist on the ship the HMS Beagle.

thousands

Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell,

In the Andes he observed fossil shells of marine organisms in rock beds at about 4,300 m.

One reason that Darwin was so eager to study life on land was that he suffered from terrible seasickness and couldn't wait to get off the Beagle.

to collect specimens, make observations, and keep careful records of anything he observed that he thought significant.

trekked hundreds of miles through unmapped region.

catalog his specimens and write his notes.

praised by the scientific community.

experts for study.

bird specialist

Darwin's bird collections from the Galapagos Islands, located about 1,000 km west of South America.

13 similar

Other experts

believe that species change over time.

evidence f

In 1837 Darwin began his first notebook on evolution. For several years Darwin filled his notebooks with facts that could be used to support the theory of evolution.

fossils of similar relative ages are more closely related than those of widely different relative ages.

He ran his own breeding experiments and also did experiments on seed dispersal.

Dayton. Darrow was not the first choice of the ACLU, who was concerned that Darrow's zealous agnosticism might turn the trial into a broadside attack on religion

Judge John T. Raulston, the presiding judge in the Scopes Trial

  William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic candidate for President and a populist, led a Fundamentalist crusade to banish Darwin's theory of evolution from American classrooms

Judge Raulston

A jury of twelve men

They also proposed the unimaginable, that Homo floresiensis lived contemporaneously on Flores with Homo sapiens.

Erasmus, was an early student of evolution and his half-cousin, Francis Galton, was a noted statistician who was considered the father of eugenics.

o worries about money

connections in the scientific world

philosopher, Herbert Spencer.

famous biologist, Thomas Huxle

But fact and reason alone cannot explain the different reactions to new hypotheses and theories we see in the examples above.

faith that future scientists will address the shortcomings in the initial theories.

Being German wasn't Wegener's only problem; the arguments he used to support his hypothesis crossed into disciplines that were not his specialty.

Darwin's theory quickly came to dominate. Within 5 years, Oxford University was using a biology textbook that discussed biology in the context of evolution by natural selection.

At Oxford, evolution by natural selection had gone from hypothesis to a priori

Wegener did not have an explanation for how continental drift could have occurred

little challenge until the 1960's.

he drew from the fields of geology, geography, biology and paleontolog

coal deposits, commonly associated with tropical climates, would be found near the North Pole and why the plains of Africa would show evidence of glaciation.

A radical new view on their discipline could be a threat to their own authority.

"If we are to believe in Wegener's hypothesis we must forget everything which has been learned in the past 70 years and start all over again."

The authorities in the various disciplines attacked him as an interloper that did not fully grasp their own subject.

The reactions by the leading authorities in the different disciplines was so strong and so negative that serious discussion of the concept stopped

The world had to wait until the 1960's for a wide discussion of the Continental Drift Theory to be restarted.

Alfred Wegener is one modern scientist amongst many that demonstrate that new ideas threaten the establishment, regardless of the century.

ontinental Drift Theory through the first few decades of the twentieth century.

Africa a

ow, researchers Dr Stephen Lycett and Alastair Key have shown that the hands of our ancestors may have been subject to natural selection as a result of using simple cutting tools

apes,

2.6 million years ago,

show that 'biometric' variation

Darwin proposed that the use of stone tools may have influenced the evolution of human hands.

Competition

simple

Hair and eye color may be such neutral variations in human beings

variations a

antelope’s speed m

water retention in a desert plant

survive to maturity

favorable variations

passed from generation to generation natural selection.

relationship

simply by looking at it.

“survival of the fittest.”

“Fittest” means that organisms must not only survive to adulthood, they must actually reproduce.

advantageous genetic variations are passed along and become represented with increasing frequency in succeeding generations.

breeding programs.

Canis familiaris

several discipline

The Chihuahua

Saint Bernard

breeding programs.

Artificial selection

the same gene pool

the ability to interbreed and produce fertile offspring.

“man’s best friend.”

20 years

natural selection.

Organisms produce more offspring than the environment can support

Archeology: The study and interpretation of ancient humans, their history and culture, through examination of the artifacts and remains they left behind

Cultural Anthropology:(also: sociocultural anthropology, social anthropology, or ethnology) studies the different cultures of humans and how those cultures are shaped or shape the world around them

Biological Anthropology

using genetics, evolution, human ancestry, primates, and the ability to adapt.

Linguistic Anthropology: examines human languages

pplied anthropology is simply the practice of applying anthropological theory and or methods from any of the fields of Anthropology to solve human problems

Culture is:

Learned

Patterned

•Shared

•Adaptive

Symbolic

At its most basic level, the difference between Culture and culture is in the way they are defined. C

lture with a capital C refers to the ability of the human species to absorb and imitate patterned and symbolic ideas that ultimately further their survival

Familial culture

Every family is different, and every family has its own culture

icro or Subculture

distinct groups within a larger group that share some sort of common trait, activity or language that ties them together and or differentiates them from the larger group

clique

Mexican-Americans

micro-culture would be the Japanese hip hop

Cultural universals

Claude Levi-Strauss

gender roles, the incest taboo, religious and healing ritual, mythology, marriage, language, art, dance, music, cooking, games, jokes, sports, birth and death

tual ceremonies

f cultural relativism deny the existence or reduce the importance of cultural universals

Language and cognition

Society

Myth, Ritual, and aesthetics

Technology

This problem of right and wrong in terms of crossing cultural lines is a big one.

intrinsic cultural distinctions that are meaningful to the members of a given society, often considered to be an 'insider’s' perspective.

reate bias o

Enculturation

This process is the way in which we obtain and transmit culture.

In the !Kung Bushman tribe they look down upon people who think highly of themselves and who are arrogant. To avoid these characteristics, each child was raised to put down and mock others when they do things such as hunting and other activities.

Cultural Transmission

Symbols and Culture

Symbols are the basis of culture. A symbol is an object, word, or action that stands for something else with no natural relationship that is culturally defined

Ethnocentrism

Cultural Relativism

Ethnography

Deconstructing Race and Racism

Race was created long ago as a tool to separate humans

Deconstructing the social concept of race has been a major interest of Cultural Anthropology at least since Franz Boas's work on race and immigration in the early 1900's.

Race is not biological but it's supposed to be a way to classify biological differences by grouping people according to different characteristics that they have

There is no biological part of race. It is strictly a concept created by humans to try to better understand differences between us

Technology

By the Color of Our Skin is not a policy book. It aims to describe America's black-white condition, not to point the way to racial harmony

Desegregation, they say, "means the elimination of discriminatory laws and barriers." Integration, by contrast, is "governed by behavior and choice."

They give integration an almost impossibly strict definition. It's not enough for whites to interact with blacks with whom they share space, whether residential, professional, or personal interest. Whites must actively seek out and embrace blacks.

American culture doesn't exist apart from black American culture. Some of this integration may be virtual - corporate ads and university brochures, for example.

Yet due to centuries of separation, black Americans have developed a culture that is distinct from, even as it exerts a disproportionate influence on, America's white or mainstream culture.

She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language.

They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree.

many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought.

controversial.

How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking—that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it?

Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others' motives, imitating others, and being creative.

chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task.

Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have been taught to use sign language and symbols to communicate with us, often with impressive results.

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