*FSEM-the human animal*

Here are some cool pictures i found.  

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Should we eat meat?  This video is about human diets, it specifically addresses meat in the human diet.  I found a couple things that may seem a little confusing and inaccurate in the video. First, the video has a neanderthal-like cartoon, but as we have learned in class, scientific evidence supports that we (humans) did not evolve from neanderthals, rather we had a common ancestor.  So, hopefully the illustrator was only creating a very “rough” looking human, and was not intending on the cartoon to look like neanderthal.  Secondly, a lot of the points they make are very blunt, and don’t have a lot of evidence to back them up.  Other than that it’s a good video about how human bodies are not physically built to consume meat.

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What is diversity? I believe that diversity is a variety of elements that are different from one another in some aspect.  These “elements” can be different by color, shape, traits, intelligence, ect.  Diversity plays a key role in how we look at others and compare them to ourselves.  Some believe that the University of Mary Washington lacks diversity among the students, faculty and staff at the school.  I disagree with these people, and I believe that UMW is tremendously diverse.

            The people that see a lack of diversity here at UMW are probably focusing their attention towards the lack of racial differences within the students, faculty and staff.  According to College Board, UMW’s student body consists of 60% White, 6% Asian/Pacific Islander, 4% Hispanic, 3% Black, <1% American Indian/Alaskan Native, and 27% unreported.  The vast majority of the students at UMW are white, which does create a lack of diversity.  But skin color is only one way to categorize a person, and most of us would agree that skin color has little to do with who a person is. “Many of these dramatic differences are adaptations to different climates and don’t imply any deeper genetic differences” (Ananthaswamy 2002).  These racial differences are merely a reflection of an adaptation that has changed the color of their skin.  If you want a more “colorful” school, then there is a reason to be concerned about the lack of diversity, but race has no significant relationship to what each individual has to offer to UMW.

            However, if you are looking at these individuals by their characteristics and who they are, and not by race, then there is plenty of diversity. “85 per cent of humanity’s genetic diversity occurs among individuals within a single population” (Ananthaswamy 2002).  Genetically we are more different within a population, so it is hard not to have a diverse group of people.  Even if the majority of students at UMW are white, there will still be large variation in characteristics. The more creative and unique people invited to become a part of UMW, the more diverse it will become. The internal characteristics, traits, cultures and knowledge are what can make a school, like UMW, more diverse. Our concept of diversity should be based upon the uniqueness of an individual, like their talents and hobbies.

            UMW is already diverse, but the school can make some changes to slightly increase their diversity. On the application to apply to UMW, you have a choice to either check a box corresponding to your race, or you can choose not share your race with the school.  UMW might say that this will not affect your acceptance into the school, but if this section were completely removed from the application there would be no way the school could discriminate against color. I think that this section of the application should be taken out, and instead there should be a short essay with a prompt about what sets you apart from the crowd.  This would blind fold UMW to the color of your skin, and would help them decipher which students, faculty and staff would make up the most diverse population.   UMW should focus more on these, and a little less on grades and scores if they want a more diverse campus.  Grades can sometimes be deceiving, so by looking beyond the grades and into a student’s personal life, they can find someone who has a lot to offer to the school

            UMW only lacks in diversity when it comes to superficial aspects like race.  I think Board of Admissions here does a great job in accepting a diverse range students, faculty and staff to keep this school lively and fresh. My only concern is that some still feel that race is what keeps a population diverse, in which it does, but only on a physical and non-relevant level.  We should base our criteria for the term diversity from the inside, the bits and pieces that make up who we are and what we have to offer, while excluding irrelevant criteria like race.

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This picture has many things wrong with it. It’s implying many different aspects of evolution that evidence so far has strongly disagreed with.

The picture is implying that Homo sapiens evolved from chimpanzees. Chimpanzees and humans did share a common ancestor, but Homo sapiens did not evolve from chimpanzees from what we know of. Chimps and upright hominids have separate lineages going in different directions emerging from their common ancestor, there is no proof that upright hominids evolved from chimpanzees.

And even if we did evolve from chimpanzees, this picture shows way too much of a jump from the chimpanzee to the upright hominid. Johanson argues (Wong 85) ”You don’t just magically flip some evolutionary switch somewhere and transmute a quadruped into an upright-walking bipedal human. It looks like natural selection is selecting for bipedalism in the lower limbs and pelvis first, and things that are not really used in bipedal locomotion, such as arms and shoulders, change at a later stage.” There is no way that a upright hominid could suddenly start walking upright, there would have been more of a transition from being a quadruped to being a bipedal hominid.

Since we don’t really have a clear evidence of what our common ancestor looked like, it’s wrong to show that we evolved from a chimpanzee. We may have evolved from something similar to a chimpanzee, but the picture is definitely implying that we did evolve from one. Really there should be a question mark where the chimpanzee is, because there are not enough fossil records to prove what exactly we evolved from. According to Rose and Mueller (2006) we only have fossils that are around 4 million years old, but if they could find fossils that were 7 or 8 million years old they would be able to decipher more about our common ancestor. Maybe then we can figure out what the first figure of this picture might look like.

The picture also shows that we have been basically the same height through out our entire evolution. This is impossible, upright hominids were much smaller before they evolved into today’s human. They slowly began to increase in size due to different influences. A good example of this is Lucy. Lucy was an Australopithecus afarensis, which would probably only grow around 40 to 48 inches (Rose and Mueller 2006). So there is no way that this picture could be correct, the upright hominid figures are way too tall. This picture would be more correct if it had shorter bipedal hominids slowing growing and evolving into taller Homo sapiens.

Another thing wrong with this picture is that the upright hominid figures have white skin pigment. From the fossil records have been collected, it is clear that our common ancestor started out in Africa. So the skin pigment in each figure should either be black, or it should start out as black and turn white, indicating the migration out of Africa. White skin pigment evolved when our common ancestor left Africa and left to northern regions of the world. Scientist predict that the skin pigment change from dark to light because of the lack of sunlight in northern areas which effects the amount of melanin needed for skin to protect against ultra violet rays from the sun (Weiss 2005). The consistency of white skin pigment in this figure is implying that we didn’t evolve out of Africa, but rather somewhere more northern than Africa.

There is a lot of evidence to disagree with this picture. From what human’s have gathered from fossils this picture is nothing like what really happened during evolution.

Rose, M.R. and Mueller, L.D. 2006 Evolution and Ecology of the Organism. Pp. 601- 623. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey

Weiss, Rick. “Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin.” Washingtonpost.com. 16 Dec. 2006. Washington Post. 21 Sept. 2008 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/15/AR2005121501728_pf.html>

Wong, Kate. “Lucy’s Baby.” Scientific American Dec. 2006: 78-85.

jim is talking