Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities
Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)
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A Random Walk
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5 weeks 13 hours ago
In the words of Matt Ridley, "my porridgy contraption boggles."
First of all I would like to share with everyone a marvelous book that is relevant to our topic. Written by Matt Ridley, a wonderfully enthusiastic Englishman, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters is fascinating and accessible. Ridley dedicates each chapter to an issue or gene “tied” to a human chromosome. He writes on topics from aging to intelligence and the war between the sexes.
In anthropology, which I have immediately after our seminar, we are talking about biocultural evolution. “Biology makes culture possible […] developing culture furthers the direction of biological evolution” (Understanding Humans, 2010).
A question from anthropology:
What happens when adaptations are no longer useful?
We are a picture of what was really adaptive in the past and still is mostly adaptive today. What does this mean? I keep coming back to the idea of some sort of balance in the universe, on the Earth. I have this thought that the world and its species should co-evolve, keeping pace with each other, though this is clearly not true and impossible. My thought is that our consumption and other parts of our cultures are maladaptive to living on the Earth. It feels like it should be strange that we are now endangering ourselves by endangering the earth. It comes back to evolutionary processes as being somewhat laggy, like videochat with a bad connection, perpetually responding to something that happened a minute ago (or was happening eons ago). I am rambling, I know. Anyway, cultural evolution is the same way. It takes a long time for change to come around – such as people to change their habits and limit childbearing or limit car usage.
My thoughts are awfully jumbled on the topics we are discussing now and I’m experiencing that age-old temptation to be finalized, to know what I think about these issues, to have a final opinion. However, I can’t because as Elisa said, we are always evolving. So I am just going to let my thoughts be jumbled for a bit and wait and work and hope they fall into place.