06/25/2020- Why study Human Evolution anyways?
Studying evolution, but specifically human evolution, is incredibly important in a time of unknown futures. Climate change is happening, and there is a lot of mystery behind what will happen to humans and the rest of the world. Something that can help with that is human evolution. We know the genus Australopithecus, the predecessor to Homo sapiens, and the genus Homo evolved in times of tumultuous climate, where there was a lot of back and forth between temperatures and humidities. The fact that our ancestors not only survived, but evolved to become more adapted to their environment shows how resilient humans are. This current state of climate crisis is scary, and should be scary, but it can be handled if given the attention needed, and can be aided by looking at past ways humans have adapted to extreme climates.
Another important thing to come out of studying human evolution is advances in medicine and genetics. We know certain diseases and conditions are hereditary, so by tracing the genes back to its origin, it could help to find a cure for some of the biggest afflictions, like Alzheimers, hemophilia, or even certain types of cancers. There is about 2% of Neanderthal DNA in humans from Europe; understanding our ancestors and where we came from can lead to plenty of information about the present and why humans have evolved this way, and how why may evolve in the future.
interesting to link this to both climate change and genetic studies. These are 2 areas that certainly evoke 'importance' in a way that things that happened 3 million years ago may not. Of course, both of those are also problematic (I asked a similar question in a class last Fall where you have to do an elevator pitch to the President, something which might have to take a different approach....).
ReplyDeleteThinking through this linking it to cancer is interesting cause we could ask questions like how antagonistic pleiotropy plays a role here...and this is something anthros may be able to study. I wonder if linking this to research on systemic racism's affect on the genome could be relevant here...
nice job! your posts are always so interesting to read!