This week I really enjoyed leaning about our continuing evolution. I think when we talk about evolution in classes or casually, we forget that humans and other species are still evolving around us, and there are a lot of changes that could occur just within our lifetimes. I think this was a very good topic to end this class on and it leaves a lot up to discussion for the future.

One of the biological changes we discussed in lecture has to do with genetic drift. Genetic drift is when the frequency of a genotype changes in a population. This has been happening for a very long time and is continuing to happen today. Smaller populations tend to go through changes a lot quicker than larger ones. It is obvious that larger populations wouldn’t go through change as quickly because of the amount of people and the time it would take for all/most of these people to change. 

Mutation is another biological change that is happening in our world. Mutations are always happening in our cells and in our DNA. These can always lead to new traits and can be passed on for generations after one of them occurs. Genes are always changing. 

An environmental change is natural selection. For me, this one is harder to see in our modern world. An example used in the lecture was malaria, and whether or not a society has the tools to protect and prevent against this. Another example of this from lecture is climate change, and how the way we are damaging earth can affect others in the future. It may be fine now but in the years ahead, many lives could be affected. 

Some cultural traits that have evolved throughout the centuries have had to do with technology. Technology is ingrained into our culture as Americans at this point in time. You never really see anyone without a cell phone or headphones in walking on college campuses or in large cities. The culture of technology even extends to the home life with Alexa and Google home. We do not even have to use a phone or computer to google something anymore, we can just say it whenever we wonder. 

Another cultural trait that has evolved has been the culture of food. Many years ago, food had to be grown, harvested, and then cooked. You could not eat what you could not grow unless your traded for it. Nowadays, we have access to ANY kind of food we want. We can get Italian food, Mexican food, Indian food, Japanese food, and many more in just East Lansing alone. Instead of having to grow and harvest it we can pay to have it delivered to our door. This is a very drastic change from the hard work we had to put in before when it came to food. 

Overall, humans are evolving and changing every day in many different ways. I am grateful that I got to learn a lot more about evolution and how we as humans have evolved and are still evolving.