Hello!

At Michigan State University, I am studying Supply Chain Management in the Eli Broad College of Business. Many of my peers in this course are most likely studying in the sciences. Although I haven’t had many science courses beyond the required ones at university and in high school, I am interested in learning about evolution, human variability, science and anthropology. This is one of the reasons that I decided to sign up for this course, my goal is to push myself beyond my normal business coursework and surround myself in a different learning environment. I look forward to reading other students’ blog post and gain insight from their coursework and experiences studying something different from me. Specifically students that are studying within the science field to hear about how the material is their classes is similar and different than this course. 

My field of study doesn’t focus on human variability and evolution. In the business school, I don’t focus on the scientific side on human variability. This course is my first time visiting this topic since high school. I have enjoyed re-learning this information further on in my education. The business school at Michigan State focuses more on studying human and their behavior and the implications of that in the business world and life in general. I do believe that understanding the evolution and variability of humans can help understand the people we interact with on a daily basis specifically in the business world as well. 

One key learning from this section that made me think differently of evolution was that mutations can be useful. Mutations help make our generations different from one another and are passed along in our DNA. I find this significantly interesting, it is unique from what my previous perception of mutations. The videos within Explore National Geographic’s Human Genome Project provided high level value to my previous understanding of evolution and human variability. I do believe with my experience taking chemistry at Michigan State that “evolution is a unifying theme among many sciences”. I don’t believe evolution is a topic of conversation within specific science courses only. There is overlap between biology, chemistry, anthology and many other social sciences courses. It would be interesting to take another chemistry or biology course after anthropology to further see the alignment of evolution within the coursework. 

One takeaway that shocked my current perspective about human variability was “we are 98.6 percent similar to chimpanzees.” This fact did come as a surprise to me. It was interesting to learn about how we have a similar body plan to chimpanzees, however, it’s the regulatory genes that control the significant reasons for our differences. Following up to this statistic, I am curious to learn about the percentage of similarity between other animals (if there are any). After thinking further to this statistic, I was curious how in such a small number of genes there is that much of a difference in how we look, act and communicate. The last significant learning of evolution was the migration of humans. It was intriguing to see the differences between haplogroups, specifically from Central Asia to Europe, “The subsequent interbreeding between Neanderthals and early modern humans has resulted in traces of Neanderthal DNA in many people today.” What was your most interesting Migration Route to learn about?

Thanks for reading!

Allie