Prior to taking this course, I took two other anthropology courses at Michigan State, ANP 201 and 203. I expected this course to be very similar to those courses and that it would have a lot of overlapping content that I had previously learned, but I was very wrong. This course has taught me so much new information about humans and evolution. Overall, I have enjoyed these anthropology courses offered by Michigan State so much and I regret not getting a minor in anthropology. Anthropology is a subject I didn’t have much knowledge or experience with before college, and I find it to be such an intriguing field of study. These three courses I’ve taken have made me change the way I view other cultures and history. I would highly recommend any of these classes to any student at Michigan State. This course, in particular, has taught me so much information about how humans have evolved over time, while the other two courses I took discussed in depth how cultures differ and a lot of information about fossils.

As I said above, the main focus of this course was human evolution and our ancestors. Interestingly enough, even though we may not realize it, we are still evolving! Think about this – all of our ancestors didn’t realize they were evolving. One way that humans are still evolving today is a broader concept – cultural evolution. We’ve all heard multiple times that America is a “melting pot” of culture and diversity. I think we talked about this a few weeks ago in this course, but cultural evolution is the idea of subcultures or small groups of the population mixing together. One simple way to understand this concept is to think of larger cities in the United States. In Detroit, for example, there is Mexicantown and Greektown, among others. To me, cultural evolution is the mixing of small populations such as the ones I listed, almost to the point where they don’t exist. The culture will still be present but the people within those populations will look the same as everyone else in the general population.

Another idea that was discussed in this week’s content was genetic engineering. There are many questions about the ethics behind genetically engineering humans. I can understand both sides of the argument about the topic, but I personally think that it should only be used to rid detrimental genetic disorders or diseases – especially those that are hereditary. I do not agree with parents choosing certain traits for their children to have. It’s a little bit scary to think that science and technology have progressed so far and now this idea could become real life. To me, it seems as if we as humans have evolved to become smart enough to cause our own evolution in this sense. I think there are more ways than we realize that technology is impacting us and our evolution – for better or for worse. Overall, this week’s content was very interesting to me and I really enjoyed this course.