This week, we come towards the end of period of studying human evolution. With the ending near, what better way to end the discussion of evolution than to discuss the future. This weeks prompt is all about how exactly we’ve continued to evolve and change. This question is posed because of the fact that we never stop evolving and changing, even though we’ve strayed quite far from the comparisons to the apes etc,

The interesting and more generically applicable method of change comes from the interactions between biology and culture. This method of bio-cultural change is like an evolutionary tug of war in which change is generated by the constant interactions between culture and biology, as the name suggests. This is more of an overarching idea, and less of a specified concept. It helps us understand the effects of technology,agriculture, etc. These effects are studied to go even further into the discussion.

One of the ways we can look even further is by looking at gene flow. By looking at wars, famines, diseases, and all sorts of other factors, we can see patterns. By following these events we can see how migrations of populations allowed for even more change in the new areas they moved to by introducing new/different genes to these populations/locations. This is like the Europeans establishing contact with the “new world” and entering the previously quite reclusive and sequestered Asia and Africa.The populations of these regions may still have some distinct characteristics, but they are shells of the populations that used to inhabit those lands.
These movements of genes and people all take place on a scale that is quite large. While it does, and can occur on the smaller level, it’s such a globally impactful concept that its quite easy to use its grand examples as a display tool.
However, on the topic of population size, another key concept is gene drift. This idea revolves around populations being so isolated that they essentially generate many more distinctions than their neighbors, who could literally occupy lands/locations right next to them.
Going off of the example we were given, the Amish are a group of people who help explain this concept. They may live right down the road from you, and possibly even speak the same language. However, their isolation and and lack of reproduction outside of their own particular cultural group has lead them to possess a degree of variability that is generated on accident in many situations.

Of course a final example is natural selection, but that concept and idea interacts with the others so often and has been discussed so many times that I found it placed on the back burner when creating this blog post. The ideas are still interesting, don’t get me wrong. However, out of my own interest I found it much more entertaining to look into the concepts of genetic drift and genetic flow when discussing human variability. That is the reason I elected to leave that portion out of my post for the most part.