After reading the pdf file by Brian J. Alters and Sandra M. Alters article titled: “Why Should Students Learn Evolution?”. It clearly explains the correlation between biological concepts and evolution, you can not simply cross out the other. Evolution answers the key questions to biological sciences. Think of it as an explanatory framework that scientists use to interpret, organize observations, and even make predictions based on this crucial information from evolution. When I read in the following statement about how “evolution is a unifying theme among many sciences”. It rang true to me especially in my major.
As a double major in B.A. in Psychology and B.A. in Anthropology, I can see now how evolution contributes in so many different ways in biological sciences. Even though we are only in our second week in Physical anthropology, it has become very apparent to me that evolution and anthropology are linked to just about everything. In the article, it mentions that “…. not only does it enrich and provide a conceptual foundation for biological sciences …..such as anthropology, astronomy, geology, and paleontology.” I was shocked but not surprised to read that anthroplogy would be listed.
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. I can see very clearly now how evolution played an important role in my archaeology, medical anthropology, and cultural anthropology courses that I took few years back. If we take a look at archaeology, they understand evolution quite well because it is literally used here by tracing physical evidence of evolution by studying excavated sites where there might be like a human skull, pots, seeds of a plant, and even diseases.
As for psychology, I really did not think about biological and environment (key terms used to describe biological studies and evolution) affects human behavior and health. I believe it was two summers ago that I took a course in community psychology and anthropology, but I can not remember the name of the course. Anyway, I realized how these two go hand-in-hand. I was able to make the same connection with evolution and my majors. So it was interesting to see this in a different light and being able to connect it to my majors is pretty cool.
I also wanted to mention some informative pieces that I read in this article that had me thinking about psychology and anthropology being connected to Evolution. This week lecture notes, we also had to watch a film and a short clip titled: “Epigenetics: The Ghost in Your Genes” and ” Richard III – The DNA Analysis and Conclusion.” I realized that these people who ended up having a piece of their DNA turned off or missing has caused physical and/or mental disability. Requiring them to need assistance to figure what happened and later also bring psychology majors to understand how this analyze the cognitive mind. In the second film, a man remains was found at a archaeological site who then used DNA to help find relatives to the deseaced. I just felt that these two films in a way incompassed psychology and anthroplogy in some way or another.
Using the term “explanatory framework” is definitely accurate. Evolution is the framework to all the other sciences it is intertwined with. You can’t have one and not the other. They all build on each other and work together for us to gain a deeper understanding.
Being able to connect classes like these to our majors is really cool! When we see these required courses, it doesn’t always spark our interest like ones related directly to our major. So when we are able to see how all these subjects work together, we get more involved in our education.
You also bring up an interesting connection with clip and psychology. Our genes often have so much to do with our mental health and understanding these things is important for helping patients. This part of your post spoke to me as my major is social work, a field related to psychology.
I think its really interesting as to how our whole bodies make up can contribute to all different fields of study. Being a psychology major as well, I also enjoyed the clips; “Epigenetics: The Ghost in Your Genes” and ” Richard III – The DNA Analysis and Conclusion.” The people that ended up having some of their DNA turned off or was missing leading them to physical or mental disabilities. I think its so interesting that we can use different fields of study in combination to help understand mental health and I believe it can be extremely important to use the knowledge from these fields to conclude understandings and new theories to help people. Using evolution as the framework and all of these subfields as helping guides along the way through this exploration can eliminate limits on all knowledge.
I too especially after reading the PFD by Alter and Alter really saw the connection between biological context and evolution and how you really need to exapand and understand both concepts to know the full potential knowledge. Evolution Is the “building block” in my opinion of understanding and linking all secinetifc subfields and helps us get a deeper more accurate understanding of the human biology. I love psychology and thought it was interesting when you didn’t really relate it at first to evolution because I didn’t either. Researching mental health using evolution I think can lead to patterns whether that is genetic or environmental factors that can answer questions to why something happened or is maybe reoccurring in a certain generation. Studying evolution I think helped us advanced in understanding the human body so much and will continue to open more gateways.
Reading this post, I am happy to be able to see that you found the same quotes in Alters and Alters appealing to you as much as it was to me. The way that the article described the concept of evolution as being a framework of biology really brought the entire concept of biological anthropology together. I found it very interesting that majors such as psychology and biology can go hand in hand through teaching the studies of evolution to its students. In my blog post, I brought up an article that we were supposed to read called the 2% difference that stressed brain differences between chimpanzees and humans. You also brought up learning about the brain and how evolution plays a huge role in determining who gets to evolve and when and why its so important. Really nice read!
I found your post to be really informative and interesting. As someone who only recently began studying Psychology (I am getting a minor degree in Cognitive Science) I was wondering how much Psychology and Anthropology would really coincide with one another in a tangible sense. Sometimes I tend to conflate Anthropology with Archaeology since my focus in Anthropology so far has been in Archaeology. I love learning about how other fields of Anthropology work and what about them others love to study. I also thought the “Epigentics: The Ghost in Your Genes” was a truly fascinating documentary that did well to demonstrate how interdisciplinary Anthropology really is, which makes a lot of sense considering the holistic nature of the field! Thanks for sharing your post, I enjoyed reading it a lot.
I found it really interesting that you are dual majoring in psychology and anthropology because for a while, I thought about majoring in anthropology but I finally decided on human biology. I also found it interesting that you never thought about the relationship between biology and the environment because, in human biology, we focus on the way the environment affects the way humans interact and evolve. I also completely agree with how Alters and Alters appealed to you the way it appealed to me, with the connection between biological context and evolution and how it expanded your knowledge in both fields. Lastly, realizing how psychology and biology go hand in hand is extremely important in this course and in life in helping pursue whatever career.
I too am a psychology major so I understand completely where you are coming from. I did not know much about evolution because it was not taught to me in high school. I went to a Catholic private high school so the knowledge I had on evolution was from my own research and experience. Until I took this course and started learning more about what evolution is, I did not realize how interconnected evolution was to my own, psychology. I like how you realized the connection between the film “Epigenetics: The Ghost in Your Genes” and the cognitive mind. It is really interesting how evolution has such an impact on the field of psychology yet we do not even realize it. I think it is extremely important to learn about evolution as it is a part of us and effects our lives. Many do not realize that, as I did not but it really helped me see how interconnected our lives are.
I thought your post was really interesting. I think anthropology is really great how it connects culture and science. Learning about the evolution of how it all comes together is very distinctive in this whole thing. When it comes to environmental and health we may only focus on one thing than another. I like that this topic has become very broad and we are able to find the correlation between all aspects of anthropology.