As an upcoming 4th year human biology major, I have had the chance to learn a lot about evolution and all of its parts, including how it works, how it happened, and about the specific evolution of certain species. Before watching this weeks lectures and reading the PDFs that we were assigned, generally speaking, my definition of evolution was the changing of a species over a long period of time caused by the mutation of certain genes that prove to be favorable for that certain species. Not only was I taught about evolution in several of my science classes, but also in several history base classes in highschool and in some of my IAH classes that i have taken here at MSU
One class that I took here at MSU that focused a lot on evolution and biodiversity was BS 171 that focused on population studies. In this class, we first learned a lot about genes and alleles and everything concerning the general ground works of genetics. Once we covered this, we were able to dive deeper into topics that surround evolution and how a certain species has changed over hundreds of years. One activity i remember that we had to do was in small group, we were assigned research a certain species and write a research about this species. We looked at common ancestors, looked at how the species has changed, and looked at what kind of traits have been replaced by others over the years. My group was assigned the cheetah, and it was very interesting learning not only its evolution, but the massive bottleneck that this species dealt with that caused the cheetah species to me nearly identical in all of its traits.
After doing this week activities and reading, i would say that my views on evolution have not necessarily changed, but have merely been reinforced. Much of the information in the articles such as the Alters and Alters piece and the 2% difference article was new to me, but again, this new information only reinforced my views on evolution and built my knowledge that i already had on the topic. One thing that the articles did make me realize is that i feel as if many future healthcare professionals don not really focus on evolution and everything that it entails. Personally, i do think that there is a great amount of information that you can learn from evolution like making predictions from the future and learning from the past, but I do not think that students such as myself have the desire or drive to continue to learn about evolution.
I find your take on this interesting since we are both at the end of human biology program. That BS 171 class sounds very cool and the activity you did sounds very beneficial when it comes to thinking about common links and ancestors. Especially what you found out about the cheetah in particular is very interesting to think about and now I want to know what the bottleneck was that occurred to make them all nearly identical now. It’s also so crazy to think about how they’re all nearly identical but are still able to breed with no repercussions of inbreeding and I’m curious how that works. I have to agree about your comment where you state that much can be learned and applied to the future of science because I think a lot of the answers lie with past generations of humans as well as our closest ancestors.