A publishing platform for the Mary Washington community
Matt Abramson
11/19/08
Professor Dolby
Human Animal
Mate Choice
In both humans and animals alike, the process of sexual selection and mate choice is crucial to the survival of the offspring. Sexual selection is based off of the Darwinian theory of survival of the fittest. Mate selection is designed to help individuals attract the fittest [...]
Caroline Turner
Dolby : Freshman Seminar “The Human Animal”
November 18, 2008
Mate Choice/Sexual Selection
A main fear of practically every human being is ending up alone or alienation from a social norm. Sexual selection, which influences mate choice, is based off of the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest. A stereotypical preoccupation of many [...]
Race and Genocide in Evolution
Race is a socially constructed concept in which humans classify individuals into distinct groups. Throughout history, the concept of race has initiated the extreme cultural divergences of groups of people, causing many enduring discriminations and ideologies against other races. Despite the major sociological and cultural differences between races, biologically, genetic diversity [...]
On June 6, 1997, eighteen-year old Melissa Drexler not only gave birth at her high school prom but also concealed her pregnancy for nine months. After suffering contractions during the dance, she went the bathroom to give birth and then wrapped the infant’s body in trash bags and disposed of it in [...]
Here are some cool pictures i found.
Modern man has evolved into a completely different organism since it first walked the Earth. Ever since the split between our closest relatives, chimpanzees, the human race has undergone numerous changes in respect to various aspects of our lifestyle. Setting aside our large brains and bipedal locomotion, another distinct feature of human evolution is our [...]
There is no doubt that the human species is both driven to and repelled by the idea of monogamy. When looked at in evolutionary terms, it originally appears that especially for males, it would be most beneficial to seek multiple partners. But despite this fact, many cultures accept monogamy as the social norm. The main [...]
Matt Abramson
Professor Dolby
Human Animal
10/17/08
Some have expressed concern over UMW’s lack of diversity among its students, faculty, and staff. What should UMW’s priorities be in increasing its diversity, and by which criteria should our concept of diversity be based?
Americans have been affected by race for decades and although many consider it to be [...]
Essay #2: Diversity at UMW
When students go to college, many seek to venture outside of their comfort zones they previously held at home. Many students seek to engage in new experiences and meet interesting people. The University of Mary Washington is accused of having a lack of diversity amongst the students, faculty and staff. [...]
Importance of Diversity
How to go about increasing diversity on College campuses is a major issue of debate. I personally noticed the lack of diversity on UMW’s campus within the first few days and believed something should be done about it. However, what that something should be is not always very clear.
One popular attempt [...]
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 [...]
According to scientific evidence, people can be genetically grouped into clusters even if these clusters do not align with current racial groups (Under the Skin, 2002). Scientific research is shifting the paradigm of thought away from past notions that races were indicative of biological differences between humans. The new paradigm of thought is humans [...]
Race is seen as a huge issue in society, but biologically, race is nonexistent. There are people in the world who kill over race and who take pride in being a part of one race as opposed to others. But recent scientific research has shed light on human DNA, which shows no distinction between races [...]
Deceiving Illustrations of Human Evolution
The theory of evolution is one of the most significant ideas in science. In spite of the deficient fossil record, scientists who study human evolution have been able to draw extraordinary pictures of what the different hominid species might have looked like and how humans came to be. Although, by examining [...]
When mentioning the theory of evolution, people automatically think of chimpanzees morphing into modern day humans, which is a grossly oversimplified and inaccurate understanding of modern evolutionary theory. We have all seen the stereotypical picture dozens of times, the one of a chimpanzee followed by a slightly more human-like creature, with another creature [...]
Katherine Houston
Problems with the Evolution Picture Blog
This picture is inaccurate because the genus homo evolved from the genus Australopithecus. They did not evolve in a straight line, they branched out. As they left Africa more and more genetic variation occurred so different species came about.
The second thing wrong with this picture is the characters after [...]
While the inaccuracy of this evolutionary picture is not immediately apparent, it actually contains some pretty large and important flaws. All of the attributes present in these drawings were also present in human ancestors at some point, but the main problem is that many of them weren’t around at the same time. One example [...]
What’s Wrong with This Picture?!
Many misconceptions exist on the topic of human evolution. One of the most prevalent ideas is that humans directly evolved from chimpanzees. Although no biologist or artist is fully correct in their theories or depictions, it is a fallacy to portray the idea that humans evolved directly from chimpanzees. This [...]
First of all, the evolutions of theses hominids are not in a correct time range. In the first figure, a chimpanzee to the second figure showed almost a rapid change. There should have been a gradually change in between, such as amount of hair on body or the arms and legs length. The range between [...]
Whether drawn from religious doctrine such as Christianity or not, much of humanity has embraced and become complacent with the idea that man was the creation of a great, unknown power. While this idea of humanity being a creation is currently impossible to justify for or against, the observations of Darwin and the excavation of [...]
This diagram of human evolution is one that is seen in many textbooks, and is the most well known image for describing where humans come from. It is fascinating, yet misleading. This is not really how human evolution occurred.
The image portrays a “ladder-like” progression of [...]
Human evolution is defined as, the part of biological evolution concerning the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominans, great apes and placental mammals. It is the subject of a broad scientific inquiry that seeks to understand and describe how this change occurred. Many pictures depict humans evolving directly from apes, [...]
The illustration does not correctly show the pattern of human evolution as scientists believe to have occurred. Modern humans did not evolve that quickly from chimps. In the diagram, the chimp is at the far right and the human is at the far left. In between, there are 2 semi-chimp/humans. In reality, there were many [...]
