Anth

  • What is Anthropology?

    • Anthropos - meaning “human” or “man”

    • Ology - meaning “the study of”

    • Divided into four main subfields:

      • Archaeology

        • Study of past humans through the analysis of their material remains/culture

          • They do this by studying material remains, a.k.a., material culture that has been left behind

      • Cultural Anthropology

        • Study of contemporary human societies by studying the origins and development of human cultures

          • Culture: Learned behavior that is transmitted person to person. Learned behavior that can be shared across both space and time

      • Biological Anthropology

        • Study of human biology, focusing on how humans and their relatives – both past and present – have evolved and vary from one another

      • Linguistic Anthropology

        • The study of the history, construction, and use of language in human populations

    • Biocultural Approach

      • The scientific study of the interrelationship between human biology and culture

    • Allied Fields

      • Archaeology

      • Ecology

      • Geology

      • Biology

  • Biological Anthropology and Science

    • Science: the organized study of the natural world, looking at how things are built and how they behave by observing, experimenting, and testing ideas against evidence.

      • Science is a way of acquiring knowledge

      • It seeks natural causal explanations for observable phenomena

      • Searches for observable regularity (requires that findings be repeated and consistent)

      • Relies on empirical observation by independent observers

      • Requires that proposed explanations be falsifiable

    • Scientific Method

      • A step-by-step way to study the natural world by observing, testing ideas, and drawing conclusions based on evidence.

      • Observation

      • Question

      • Hypothesis

      • Experiment

      • Analysis

      • Conclusion

  • Evolutionary Theory

    • The theory of evolution explains how species change over time through processes

    • It is not a belief system

    • Often misportrayed as linear

    • As a scientific theory it is well supported by data from centuries of scientific inquiry

    • Aims to explain the why and the how life on Earth shows both incredible diversity and underlying unity

    • An organism is any living individual entity that can carry out the basic processes of life – such as growth, preproduction, response to the environment, and stuff life that yeah I missed the rest of the slide

  • Systems to organize the Natural World

    • Taxonomy: the classification of organisms in a system that reflects the degrees of relatedness

    • Phylogeny: the evolutionary history and relationships among species or groups of organisms

  • Ancient attempts at organizing the living world

    • Anaximander the Philosopher

      • Greek philosopher and scientist from ancient Turkey

      • Believed life began in the ocean

      • First animals were fish-like creatures

    • Plato

      • Plato’s Essentialism

        • Variation is unimportant

        • All species created perfectly, no change is possible

        • Essentialism: A belief that things have a set of unchanging characteristics that make them what they are; variation among things is just unimportant deviation from the “essence”

      • Aristotle

        • Greek philosopher and student of Plato

        • Grouped animals by shared characteristics (ealry attempt at taxonomy)

        • Scala Naturae (“Great Chain of Being”): Proposed a hierarchy of life, from simple to complex, culminating with humans

  • Hierarchy of Taxonomy

    • Dear King Phillip Came Over For Good Soup

      • Domain

      • Kingdom

      • Phylum

      • Class

      • Order

      • Family

      • Genus 

      • Species

  • Mary Anning

    • Discovered the first:

      • Ichthyosaurus

      • Plesiosaurus

      • Pterodactuylus


  • Gene pool: the collection of alleles present in a population

  • Evolution: A change in allele frequency overtime

  • Mutation: creates variation within the gene pool making long-term evolutionary change possible

  • There are four central mechanisms that contribute to changing allele frequencies over time:

    • Natural selection

      • Directional selection - selection at one end of the range of phenotypes

        • Continuous variation: traits that show a range of values, not just discrete categories

      • Stabilizing selection

      • Sexual Selection: Selection arising as a result of preference by one sex for certain characteristics of the other sex

    • Mutation

      • Create new alleles, making new phenomena possible

      • Introduces new variation into the gene pool

      • Occurs randomly

    • Gene flow

      • The introduction of alleles from one population into another due to migration and mating

        • Only occurs among populations within a species, not between species

    • Genetic drift

      • Bottleneck effect

        • A type of genetic drift; occurs when a population size is drastically reduced

        • Impacts

          • Reduced genetic variation; increased chance of harmful alleles becoming common

            • Population may struggle to adapt to new environments

            • Long-term effects can persist even if populations size recovers

            • Populations may show strong differences from the original purely by chance

      • Genetic Founder Effect

        • Loss of genetic variation when a new colony is established

  • What if a Population Isn’t Evolving?

    • Population is said to be in equilibrium

      • To be in equilibrium none of the evolutionary mechanisms are operating; otherwise, the allele frequencies would be changing

    • The Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium: when a populations allele and genotype frequencies be staying the same or whatever