Evolution refers to the process of heritable change in populations of organisms over multiple generations. (Nature.com) I learned evolution when I was young, maybe in primary school. At that time, we are simply taught that human beings are evolved from monkeys. I found it very amazing. When I grow older and learn more systematically about evolution, I finally learned that human beings and chimpanzees might evolve from the same species a long time ago. We might share the same ancestors, while in the long history, we evolved into quite different branches, and many species during this process became extinct. Similar knowledge is often mentioned in the subjects like biology, history, and anthropology.

Evolution is also related with other subjects in my life. For example, in sociology, we have learned some theories about social Darwinism. In this theory, they understand evolution and human variability in a quite discriminative way. Social Darwinism is based on the evolution theory of Charles Darwin. They believed in “survival of the fittest”, “the idea that certain people become powerful in society because they are innately better. (History.com) Based on social Darwinism, certain social classes enjoy privileges and even dominance over the other social classes. It is only because these people are the fittest in the society and they deserve such positions and treatments. Social Darwinism provided justice for social inequality and imperialism, and I think it also provided sources for discriminations.

Similar theory could be applied in racism. For some racist, the human variations in terms of skin color are related with their social classes. The white people are more superior than the people with darker skins, while they forget that the skin colors are the results of human variations, or the human evolutions under the long-term influences of the environment. The skin color should not be related with social statuses, and concepts like races are social constructed concepts, instead of really biological or physical ones.

Of all the readings in this week, I am greatly impressed by the article named “The 2% Difference”. According to this article, about 98% of the DNA of human beings and chimpanzees are the same. From article, I have learned that firstly, as I have mentioned above, chimpanzees and human beings are very close relatives, and we share the same ancestors a long time ago. Secondly, human beings are also quite different from chimpanzees, such as our ability to speak languages, our unique cultures, and chimpanzee’s ability to climb trees, their hairs, our different usage of tools, etc. Thirdly, this article also described why the 2% differences in genes could make such a big difference. DNA is made up of four molecules, called nucleotides: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), and thymine (T). According to this article, “in genomes involving billions of nucleotides, a tiny 2 percent difference translates into tens of millions of ACGT differences. And that 2 percent difference can be very broadly distributed.” (Sapolsky, 2006) The differences between human genes and chimpanzee genes revealed the gene mutations in the past, which might occur because of insertion, deletion, or straight mutation. This article reminded me that a very slight variation in genes might result in really big differences. We must pay attention to the details.  

References

Nature.com. Evolution. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/subjects/evolution

History.com. Social Darwinism. Retrieved from https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/social-darwinism

Sapolsky, Robert. (2006). Discovery Magazine. The 2% Difference. https://discovermagazine.com/2006/apr/chimp-genome