January 11, 2011

Darwin the most important thing in university

Biology and culture

During the last thundered years, scientists have come to see humans placing in the natural
world; before believing humans to be a special being outside of nature

We are apes, a different kind of ape

People at the time had no knowledge of the internal syslarities between humans and other
primates,

From the wave of exploration of came the discovery of thousands of new species.

Carl von Linnaeus; helped people come to terms with relation between humans and the
similarities with other species. “he compared all kinds of life, anatomy, physiology,
And assigned organism into taxonomies, a system of grouping species; starting with large
groups and working down to the individual features and traits, making every distinction.

To understand the relation of species; in this time the idea of a ‘soul’ that only humans
have to set humans set. In 1770, he published his work on taxonomies.

Philosophers had to reorder the and create a great chain of being; that set non-living
things, nature, and animals at the lowest point, humans in the middle in the state of nature
and spirit, and angles and God at the top.

This is a culture perspective,

Linnaeus, challenged the great chain of being; we are animals, but we are the animals that
have cultural, and we can change are social behavior.

We were believed to be divine in form and give a portion of intellect from the divine.

But there is no generic characteristic that can differ humans and apes.

So he created a category in taxonomic level, called anthropomorphic ~ simians, primates.

He didn’t wanted to go all the way, not wanting to question God and believing it to be
Gods choice in creation.

Common traits come from common ancestry

Darwin proposed that common ancestry, all life on earth is related and changed with
decent. All forms of life are related, common traits can be found in families like in
species. And species are subject to change in decent, this happens on the genetic level,
Darwin at the time didn’t know this, nor is it critical to his arguments.

This at the time was the study of natural history, and he studied and proposed his theory;
Based on; all species and produce lots of offspring, a limiting factor of the life on earth of
recourse and so no species can live up to the potentional of reproduction. S0life is in
constant struggle, in which most die. Within related species there is variation of
similarities, humans are biologically the same, but there are small variations within each
individuals; and when the variations give an advantage in the natural struggle, the
individual can be successful and reproduce more and the beneficial trait gets past down
threw decent.

And threw this new species form and disappear, environment creates new species.

All life is created threw natural selection

No hand of God, only the natural selection

An example being the Peppered Moth;

Inspired by Darwin, anthologist have gone on to further research the evolution of

humans, including the distinction that humans didn’t evolve from chimps, the evolutions
are different and have existed as long as the other has.

The first Human like is astropithicus