Other features Shubin said evolved are the abilities of sight, smelling, and hearing. Just like today, we use different opsins to see in color than we do in black in white. Colored vision was not something found in any animal, until the gene in a mammal from millions of years ago duplicated and the copies specialized for different light sources instead of just black and white. Neil’s believes colored vision is in relation with the plants of the earth, and how it may have enabled creatures such as monkey’s tell the difference between types of fruits and leaves. All in all, Your Inner Fish was not my favorite book due to its dryness,
This question brought about the thesis of his book, that environment is more persuasive on development of civilization than people may have once thought. In the first chapter of Guns, Diamond establishes two main arguments that will become crucial to his thesis later on in the book. First, he goes in depth about mass extermination and further extinction of large mammals that occurred in New Guinea and Australia which were important for food and domestication, and secondly he argues that all the first civilized peoples in the world each had the ability to out develop one another, but were hindered or helped by their environment. Diamond continues to provide evidence for his thesis that environmental factors play a
Human has done a lot of things to change this earth to a better place: improving technologies, a great transportation system, education system, and others. A marvelous quality of brainpower is excruciatingly needed in order to do these. Putting aside the fact that those improvements consume numerous decades, human has proven that they possessed the brainpower to change the world. Asserting that bonobos, orangutans, gorillas, and monkeys are in the same order, with a lot of similar physical structures, are they smart as well? There are some sides that say no, some say their intelligences are just totally overestimated; however, I believe that apes are smart.
Scientific thinkers of the time, Larmarck and Darwin have been credited for inspiring this notion of the environment impacting the biology and subsequent behavior of beings. For example in Lamarck's (1914 ed.) theory, he outlines how an organism’s shape and organization is caused by environmentally induced habits – ‘the giraffe actively stretched its neck reaching for the upper leaves of trees in semiarid regions’ (Peet, 1985, p.312). This is all very well and good, yet some would argue in a geographical sense that these ideas need to be developed away from how the environment affects the biology of individual organisms and more towards the notion of human society and whether the environment has any role in controlling its outcome. It was Fredrich Ratzel, who indeed looked at environment determinism in this way.
Golding does not use a leader to represent Piggy, When Golding created the book he made it so that Piggy was an outcast but he knew what was right. Golding creates three main leaders in his novel Ralph, Jack, and Piggy but they did not become leaders by birth they became leaders through the circumstances they were put through, Ralph became leader by votes but why did Ralph get voted leader? The boys ended up following Jack but why did they? Piggy did not follow anybody he made his own rules, why was Piggy a real leader all
Dehumanization in Brave New World The topic is my response to the chapter included in the text book from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which tells us about how people are born and how they are “conditioned” in various methods in the fictional world in the future. My response is that people in the story are dehumanized since they do not behave like human beings, nor are they treated as human beings. One of reasons why I would think that is that they do not behave like human beings. First of all, people do not give birth to children or establish their own families any more. As human beings, even other animals, it is our nature to start a family, conceive babies, give birth to them and then nurture them in our own family.
Rifkin fails to realize that Koko was a special case and doesn’t represent the entire gorilla population. Koko is only able to use sign language and communicate because humans taught her to. Not all animals can learn sign language. Gorillas are one of the more intelligent species so they were able to. But does Rifkin expect a pig or a dog to be capable of the same feat?
Human aggression is all based off of our great ape ancestors. Although researchers have proven that the separation of humans and great apes took place only 15-20 million years ago, anthropologists still believe that “patterns of aggression were environmentally determined and culturally learned behaviors, not inherited characteristics” (Sussman, 27). One great key point that Sussman brings up in his argument is hunting. If it wasn’t for species hunting for food, we all wouldn’t exist today. Hunting is a natural way of life, there is no aggression behind it, and it is just a part of natural selection.
To better understand our history of evolution we will have to go back three point two million years ago where one of the first species of upright walking apes or hominids were discovered. Lucy, a female Australopithecus afarencis is well known for being part of the earliest species of hominids and was discovered containing forty-seven out of two hundred six bones in a full skeleton. During Lucy’s time the Earth’s plates were shifting causing the environment and climate to change. The rift valleys were forming and the rain forests were dying. In this new environment they found it more efficient to move about on two legs.
This weaker version seems to make more sense to me. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is in effect two propositions, which in a very basic form could perhaps be summed up as firstly Linguistic Determinism (language determines thought), and secondly Linguistic relativity (difference in language equals difference in thought). This topic of determinism and relativity can be applied to many areas – the study of to what extent technology influences our lives is termed the technological determinism debate. In psychology, discussion of this nature regarding the effect of environment and genetic makeup on our lives is called the nature/nurture debate. In a ‘purer’ form, there are philosophical questions of free will and determinism.