As a History major at Michigan State University, I find that my field of study can associate with the area/study of DNA and evolution in a rather direct manner. However, it is also such a broad topic that the relation could be drastically distant. While my particular interests lie in the history of politics, warfare,and lifestyles in ancient Rome or feudal Japan/China. I do find that the history of mankind and the evolution of man in particular areas of the world is quite prevalent and worth looking into even in narrower fields of study.
While browsing various articles and viewing the lessons this week, I got a much more biological view than what I usually encounter. Of course I had run into the discussion of DNA and the processes of cell division in the past, however, the full breakdown of the various proteins and formations is not a conversation I often find myself getting into. During my sophomore year of college, while I was attending a different school. I had to do a study on some of the earliest civilizations. The civilizations themselves were the primary focus of course, but we spent a good two weeks beforehand studying the early movements and developments of people as a whole. We questioned why and how the native people of lands like Japan and even the Americas came to settle those locations. We also discussed how world could have such a smaller population yet create such diverse cultures, races, etc. My civilization I studied was ancient Uruk, and as a hub world of the Ancient world, I got to discuss the various cultures and people that interacted with Uruk. This meant that I had to study the inherent differences in the people, which of course stemmed from the study of human evolution and migration from the weeks prior.
Therefore, aside from being a side study or minor characteristic in my own particular studies, DNA and evolution have played a fairly large part in my field of study as a whole. Since history is so broad, it is one of those fields that unifies the other areas of study and establishes itself as the true “jack of all trades” fields. This ties in with the “Alters and Alters” PDF which helps demonstrate this unification of studies by combining the prominence of a scientific field with the relevance of a historical one. Though it is much more a biological concept, as the Alters and Alters reading demonstrates quite clearly, I find that the most interesting and important concept to take away from the overall lesson is that the study of evolution can enter a union with just about any other study you can come up with. This of course, doesn’t come without a cost. Topics that may even seem black and white in terms of clarity can create disagreements, discussion, and even be subject to change. The study of evolution is no different and is still subjected to this idea. Maybe even more so.