Chapter 1: Biological Anthropology Flashcards
What is Anthropology?
The holistic study of the human species. Anthropology includes the study of human biology, human physical evolution, human cultural evolution and human adaptation.
What is cultural anthropology?
A subfield of anthropology that focuses on human cultural behaviorand cultural systems and the variation in cultural expression among human groups.
What is Archaeology?
A subfield of anthropology that studies the human cultural past and the reconstruction of past cultural systems.
What is Linguistic Anthropology?
A subfield of Anthropology that studies language as a human characteristic and attempts to explain the differences among languages and the relationship between and language and the society that uses it.
What is Biological Anthropology?
A subfield of anthropology that studies humans as a biocultural species.
What is the scientific method?
What is a theory?
A well-supported general idea that explains a large set of factual patterns. In science, theory is a positive term.
What is deductive reasoning?
Suggesting specific data that would be found if a hypothesis were true, a step in the scientific method involving the testing of hypothesees.
What is essentialism?
The idea that every living thing has an original, and essential form. (Thus species do not change substantially over time). This idea was that of Plato and Aristotle.
What is the great chain of being?
The idea that all living things can be ranked in order of greatness and purity.
What is catastrophism?
The idea that the earth has been repeatedly changed by natural disasters. (Georges Couvier)
What is uniformitarianism?
The idea that present-day geological and and bilogical processes can also explain the history of the earth and its life.
What is the inheritance of acquired characteristics?
The incorrect idea, associated with Lamarck, that adaptive traits acquired during an organism’s lifetime can be passed on to its offspring.
Name Darwin’s postulates
- Limited Capacity: The ability of a population to expand is infinite, but the capacity of any environment to support any environment to support populations is always finite.
- Variation in Fitness: Organisms within populations vary and this variation affects their ability to survive and reproduce. (*Note: Fitness does not mean physical fitness)
- Inheritance: Variations are transmitted from parents to offspring.
What is natural selection?
Evolutionary change based on the differential reproductive success of individuals within a species.
Natural selection
=
Non Random, Differential, Success