Entry #9: Evolution and Medicine

I believe that medicine does need an evolutionary perspective. Modern medicine does not have to fully revolve around evolution, but adding it into the medicine field for doctors to better help people may be a good way to give people better treatment. How medicine could somehow have an evolutionary perspective is by doctors learning more about it. I know not many people are for evolution but it does help to explain many things in the science field. I think that if doctors did learn how the body evolved, it could help them in their practices. Just like a mechanic fixing a car, he needs to know everything about that part in order to fix it properly. If you know nothing about what you are trying to fix then you will fail. You need to learn background information first and then work your way up. Learning about the simpler facts and then moving up into the harder information is a good way to start off. If doctors learned about the basic body parts and worked their way inward into the harder organs and bones and how they evolved, it may help them to work with their patients better. Suppose a doctor is prescribing a type of medication, there are many different aspects they need to look at such as allergic reactions and side effects. If they somehow incorporate how the body first started off maybe they can be more careful in diagnosing and prescribing medications. So, I do believe that knowing how the body evolved would be a great benefit to doctors. Knowing more about the body may lessen the time it takes them to diagnose a patient.

Entry #8: Bipedality and Brain Size

The forces of natural selection that have come to make bipedality are seen to have come from African-ape behaviors that include every day living things such as feeding postures, mating displays and vertical climbing. They also say that it has evolved from chimpanzee like ancestors. One of the main structures that led to bipedality was the big toe, the strong thigh muscles and the strong hips. Organisms then needed to start using their upper bodies to carry things and do other sorts of activities. Being on both legs and upright helped organisms to do activities much easier such as movement. What led to the evolution of larger brain size than our primate ancestor is one of the factors that have affected us is climate. Some scientists think that our brain has become larger because we were thinking ahead of the climate changes that were going to happen so we had to learn to adapt. Another reason our brain may have become larger is because we migrated farther away from the equator and our brain became larger in order to become cleverer and figure more things out. Another factor deals with parasites. Our brain may have become larger in order to fight off parasites. One last factor was the fact that we all had to fight for resources. The more we had to fight for resources, the smarter we had to become in order to outsmart the others.

Entry #7: The Ancestor's Tale Ch 1-2

In Chapter 1 of the Ancestor’s Tale, the two misconceptions that Dawkins tells us to try and avoid are one that historians try to go back and “scour the past for patterns that repeat themselves.” According to Mark Twain they want to “seek reason and rhyme for everything.” The next one has to do with the present. Dawkins says that evolution is not something to repeat but something that rhymes. The second misconception away from the past and present is the conceit of hindsight. According to Dawkins. The conceit of hindsight is “the idea that the past works to deliver our particular present.” Dawkins talks about the different theories and the physicists that brings about how our universe was made and how it was brought about to produce humanity. How scientists determine the timing and the human migration out of Africa is by exploring family trees instead of family genes. What Y-chromosome Adam and mtDNA Eve tells us about human origins is that they are only one set of MRCA’s, there are many more. Second, they were not even together. Third, they are shifting titles and fourth there was no information to single either one of them out. This means that they did have multiple partners but Adam went down the male line and Eve went down the female line. This may not be the rue story because Dawkins even said that relying on a single gene could be misleading and there are many more factors that can be added into how our human origins came about.