Camille Williams Professor Stokes ANTH 101 9 January 2022 LOR 1. Evolution is relevant to our lives today because it can tell us where we are going wrong and what changes we can make to be a healthier species. If evolution wasn’t relevant to our lives, we wouldn’t be able to care for ourselves like we do now. According to Dan Lieberman, when presented with evolutionary traits we deem as negative we can make the choice to do nothing, invest in new treatment options, educate others, or change our environment. 2. The relationship between the culture we are creating and the biology we're inheriting is: people don’t die from infectious or viral diseases anymore, instead we are getting chronic diseases as we age, some of them attributing to death. One mismatch between our biology and our culture is: A man cannot stay in space as long as he can stay on Earth because his bones will become much weaker the more time he spends in space. Having a “Stone Age Body in a Space Age World” simply means that technology is advancing faster than our bodies are. 3. Epidemiological transitions are transitions in patterns of disease among populations. 3 Epidemiological transitions are: when we went from foragers to creatures who are able to grow and make food, infectious diseases and osteoarthritis became more common. When the industrial revolution came along with its stability and improved standards of living, a rise in chronic diseases was observed and remains to this day. Now, infectious diseases are a real health concern - like AIDS, tuberculosis, lyme disease, and even new diseases. I believe that the second and third epidemiological transition had the most impact on our species because now many people die of chronic diseases, and now covid, even though we improved our cleanliness. 4. I believe that humans are still evolving. Before I took this class, one piece of evidence that could be used to prove this is that humans now are taller than humans that were living 150 years ago and are 10 centimeters shorter than people now. Knowing all that I do from this class, another example is the absence of wisdom teeth can potentially be an evolutionary trait that not everyone can experience just yet. I think that because of human advancement and the destruction of our world around us, natural selection will effect us negatively. We are making the world hard to live in not only for other animals, but for yourself as well. If we continue on as we are, in the future we could be seeing a lot of extreme weather, acidic oceans, decline of glaciers, and the rising of sea levels across the globe.(n.a, 2018) Works Cited: Climate Change Evidence: How Do We Know? (2018, September 21). Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet; NASA. https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ Liberman, Dan. (2013, December 5) The Story of the Human Body - AMNH SciCafe YouTube. (n.d.). Www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOjTSgNyiFQ Naime, Joylin. (2019). Contemporary Topics: Human Biology and Health. Pressbooks-Dev.oer.hawaii.edu. https://pressbooks-dev.oer.hawaii.edu/explorationsbioanth/chapter/__unknown__-11/
