I am pursuing my Bachelor of Science in psychology, so many of the things we have talked about thus far are things that classes I have taken in the past have touched on. I had never thought about this information from an evolutionary perspective, however, and I hadn’t thought about the connection between my different courses in this way. Although we are only in our second week of the course it has become very apparent to me that evolution and anthropology is linked to just about everything. In my courses I spend a lot of time learning about the brain, human behavior, and how both biological and environmental factors affect those things. Anthropology seems to be the link between not only human behavior and history, but genetics, health, culture, and more. Human variability has been a topic that I have learned much about in my psychology courses and it is very interesting to look at it from this evolutionary perspective. It gives me a better understanding of the information I have learned from psychology. I initially thought that this class would have very little to do with my major and what I am learning, so seeing that connection is very cool!

The article says, “Evolution is therefore a unifying theme among many sciences, providing students with a framework by which to understand the natural world from many perspectives.” I fully agree with this statement and believe that it goes even beyond sciences. The article also says, “it also permeates other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, literature, and the arts.” It reaches far and wide to many disciplines and is an important thing for students to learn in order to understand history, humans, and science. Making the connections between these subjects is exciting and makes learning the information much easier when you can apply it to your own understanding. Evolution seems to be what ties many different disciplines together, so in order to understand the different disciplines, you must first understand evolution. Evolution has the ability to unify these things.

As I mentioned, the information I have learned has given me a better understanding of the information from my previous classes. I was given information from the lectures that I had recently learned in biology but had never thought about that from an evolution stand point, but rather just a science class I had to take. It has given me a greater understanding of the connection between biological and environmental factors that I have studied in psychology and how human beings vary, specifically to their location. I thought it was very interesting to have the opportunity to take what I learned in biology and apply it to psychology in a way with evolution as my link. During my biology course I had never thought that it was information I would be able to connect in this sort of way with my discipline. Making these connections makes me very excited to learn more about anthropology and to give me a new perspective on my knowledge in psychology.