Exam 1: Week 1 and 2 Flashcards
when/how did the number of known elements change?
about 1750 they started to heavily increase known elements going from 10-120 by 2000
what is special about 1805
Daltons atomic theory occurred
what is special about 1859
Darwins Origin of species was written
what is special about 1866
genes were discovered
what was special about 1897
electrons were discovered
what is special about 1905?
atoms were discovered
what is special about 1911?
protons were discovered
what is special about 1932?
neutrons were discovered
what is special about 1953?
DNA structure was discovered
what are the reasons for elements being discovered more? (2)
- industrialization/material development
- using coal for energy - Age of Enlightenment (science/intellectualism)
- Changed understanding of the world
- Challenged authority & testing hypotheses
what was considered authority before the Age of Enlightenment?
divine relation and books with authority such as the Bible or things Aristotle and plato wrote
- When authority represents knowledge things don’t progress
what were the planets considered in pre-scientific views?
Gods => stars stay in place but they move
- Galileo first looked at Jupiter with a telescope to discover other planets
- Galileo found the moons around Jupiter ⇒ discredited that everything revolves around the Earth
how old is earth?
4.5 billion years old
- Layers tell us the environments and relative times when sediments were deposited
- We can find fossils in the layers sometimes
when did glaciers melt?
12,000 years ago
science
the study of the physical world and its manifestations ⇒ especially by using systematic observation and experiment
- Includes the study of non physical aspects such as behavior
what are features of science? (6)
- Naturalistic explanations
- Testable hypotheses
- Theoretically consilient across disciplines
- Social process carried out by fallible, biased, individual human beings
- Ongoing process ⇒ sometimes we need to ask the same question multiple times and adjust things
- Self improving and self correcting processes
testable
determining if it is false ⇒ continued lack of negating observations then the hypothesis has support but is never “proven”
what are the social processes we use in science? (4)
- Repetition is important ⇒ also by many different people
- Blind the studies (2x blind is best)
- Pre-register your methods and predictions
- Peer review during the design process
what are ongoing processes in science?
- As results increase in number our perspective may change as a general pattern across populations/species
- We want general principles we can apply to other species ⇒ we have to ask the same question with different species to find the “correct” answer
how is science self improving and correcting?
Over time, good ideas remain if we intend to make it a better
what are the steps of strong inference? (4)
- Devise alternative hypotheses
- Devise a crucial experiment (or several) with alternative possible outcomes, each of which will exclude one or more of the hypotheses
- Carry out the experiment so as to get a clean result
- Recycle the procedure, making sub hypotheses or sequential hypotheses to refine the possibilities that remain
what are precursors to strong inference? (2)
- Identify the problem/question
- Understand the background through reading, observation, experimentation
- What has already been done
- What are the contexts
- What factors could affect the outcome
exploratory research
meant to identify what the patterns are ⇒ natural history of the species
confirmatory research
testing mechanisms/hypothesis for why the patterns exist in the first place
hypothesis
a proposed explanation for a phenomenon in the natural world ⇒ explains why a relationship occurs
- It is testable
- It is falsifiable
T/F there are often better ways to do science?
True
- there are often better ways to do things to make testing hypotheses stronger ⇒ subject to financial constraints, ethical, legal, etc.
when do the results of a study fail to support a hypothesis?
- It is a true falsification of the H
- It is a poor test of the H ⇒ inappropriate methods are rampant
clean result
think about the things that need to be controlled or accounted for so we can properly interpret the results ⇒ its hard to design experiments with unambiguous outcomes
- Easier to do with cell cultures and petri dishes than with behaviors or in wild environments
BF skinner and his rats/pidgeons
- Conditioning of rat behavior where you can train animals in stages to do behaviors
- Pigeons made good study subjects for behavior ⇒ used a reward sequence system
- Modified how he rewarded the behavior ⇒ shaped behavior faster
Mars
god of war => Tuesdays
Venus
aphrodite = love and beauty ⇒ Thursdays
male sex differences (3)
- Taller, heavier, hairier, smellier, more muscular
- Aggressive, murderous, violent, suicidal
- Test higher on certain spatial skills
female sex differences (4)
- Larger corpus callosum connecting the left and right sides of their brains
- More acute sense of smell
- Test higher on certain skills (verbal)
- Live longer
what types of explanations did we used to have for dichotomy?
Stories from Genesis where men were created and then women from their rib and other Pre-biblical ⇒ someone kills a woman and creates a world from her rib
who is Von Laven and what did he do?
the guy who developed lenses to look at fabric discovered small things floating in the water when he looked at water with them => Galileo later used the stacked lenses to look at Jupiter
- Editors at the publishing site did not believe him ⇒ people were sent to the Netherlands to look at his microscope for peer review
how did N. Harsoecker first discover semen (1965)?
put semen under the microscope and found it was full of small tadpole like things
spermatozoa (homunculi sperm drawn by N. Harsoecker)
“seed animals” where at each center there was a homunculus (person) and this person takes up residence in the uterus to grow into a baby ⇒ possibly representing both male and females in his pictures
anthropology
study of anthropoi aka humans
- Logos means logic
why do we get names from the Greek?
Military conquest ⇒ Alexander the great mostly
- Alexander the great confronted Persia (now Iran) and conquered the whole of their empire
- He somehow developed a new fighting style with his troops that made them more effective
- He then established a long term greek presence (Kings included) in the area
- This brought Greek literature, philosophy,and science to this part of the world where it persisted
What is the New Testament of the Bible mainly written in?
Greek
who was Alexander a student of?
Aristotle ⇒ known as the expert on everything
- Aristotle became the authority because he was so well renowned
- aristotle was a student of Plate who was a student of Socrates informally
what did Plato found?
an academy to promote philosophical studies
- Socrates wandered in the market place talking to people about philosophy ⇒ The city of athens executed Socrates
- He was accused of corrupting the young by teaching kids that the planets were not Gods but rocks
where does Latin come from?
the Roman Empire => Western roman empire
what is Platos republic?
book that highly influenced the western world on reason and introspection
- People in the material world are stuck in a cave and confined to look at the walls
- Someone outside is casting light on the wall and doing a puppet show which we see ⇒ this is what we perceive in the material world
- The real world is the world of ideas and everything we see, feel, and touch is just an imperfect shadow of reality
what did Plato think?
Believed the material world was an imperfect shadow of the perfect world of ideas and focused on ideal types
ideal types
dichotomy between masculine and feminine which are cosmic principles in the world ⇒ we can’t avoid this thinking
evolutionary anthropology
focuses on diversity and not typology ⇒ not imperfection but the heart of the matter we are interested in
- Populations and individuals
- Not ideal types ⇒ generalizations about populations but also what the actual individual is rather than judging in relation to the ideal type
what does evolutionary anthropology focus on?
description not prescription
description
what the world is like ⇒ why is the world the way that it is
prescription
what the world should be like
- what ought to be
what lens should we study humans through?
Keep your heart but use your head and logic more ⇒ think about what ought to be too
- we don’t have a scientific way about what ought to be ⇒ we can use science to understand the world in order to change it
what is the life cycle of a guinea worm?
parasites that live on or in human bodies
- If you have a sore and you put your foot in the water, the worm will release larvae into the water to infect a water flea
- The worms go inside the daphnia and spend part of their life there
- Eventually someone will drink the water and the worms will end up in your intestines where the worms mate (Males are small and Females are larger)
- The worms produce offspring
- The female worm travels down to the leg and creates a sore to release more larvae to be released into water again
how did we decrease guinea worm prevalence?
Filtering the water gets rid of the daphnia (President Carter helped)
origin of species according to 1700 Western Europe
creation described in Genesis
- Species stay the same
- Species dont go extinct
human nature according to 1700 Western Europe
Humans created in God’s image ⇒ God was viewed like a man and created humans to be like himself
- Humans were intermediate between animals and angels
how old did creationists think the world was?
<6,000 years
where did creationists think geologic formations came from?
Noah’s flood
- Fossil bones were flood victims
who was Nicolas Steno?
Danish Catholic Bishop
Established principles of stratigraphy
- Fossils in those rocks came from living things, not from the sky or the moon
- he studied fossils that looked like shark teeth in the alps and he proposed the alps were originally at the bottom of the sea bed ⇒ which would take very long timestra
stratigraphy
layers (strata) of rocks originate from sediment in bodies of water ⇒ proposed fossils came from living things
What did James Hutton propose?
uniformitarianism
- The present is the key to the past
- Believed the earth was infinitely old ⇒ we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end
uniformitarianism
we should try to explain thing scientifically using things we see around us
what didCharles Lyell do?
wrote principles of geology (1830)
- there is a sea that deposits rocks such as limestone, etc.
what did Mary Anning do?
she was a paleontologist ⇒ wasn’t allowed to participate in scientific culture because she was a woman
- Grew up finding and selling sea shells
- She discovered many fascinating fossils
taxonomy
naming things
what did Charles Linnaeous do?
discovered flowers are sex organs and classified plant species based on their sex organs
- Son of a lutheran pastor and became a noted botanist
- Re-discovered that flowers are sex organs
- Classified plant species based on their sex parts (stamens and pistols)
- Classified known living species of plant and animal
who was William Jones?
colonial administrator (India) from Wales
- Classically educated in Greek and Latin and learned Sanskrit
- influenced linguistics studies
what is special about linguistics?
languages have many similarities (likely from accident) suggesting they came from a common source that no longer exists
- such as Greek and Latin
What did Adam smith do?
influenced economics and came up with bottom up processes (central to darwinian thinking)
- individuals pursuing self interest create wealthier communities
what did Thomas Malthus do?
also influenced economics and drew attention to scarcity and resource competition
- Human population growth may outpace growth in agricultural productivity
- Warned of ensuing famine, disease, war
What was Darwins early career like?
- Medical school ad Edinburgh => Balked at sight of blood
- Divinity school at Cambridge where he pursued interests in riding horses, hunting, and collecting beetles
- Job as gentleman’s companion for Captain fitzroy on HMS beagle
what things did Darwins theory build on? (5)
- Geology
- Taxonomy
- Historical linguistics
- Economics
- Global exploration
what did Darwin do after his voyage on the beagle?
wrote about it, married Emma Wedgwood and conducted exhaustive studies of barnacles, earthworms
- Spent 20 years thinking and writing in private notebooks about natural selection
when and why did Darwin publish his work on natural selection?
Lyell helped arrange for Darwin and Wallace to present their ideas to the Linnean Society together ⇒ scholarly place where people debated and challenged one another in the scientific community (like conferences today)
- Darwin worked to finish an abstract of his book ⇒ the origin of species before Wallace could
evolution
descent with modification ⇒ latin evolvere means to unroll
what were Darwins 5 theories of evolution?
- species change over time
- evolution is gradual
- the primary mechanism is natural selection
- evolution causes speciation
- all organisms are related by descent from a common ancestor
Domestication
a pattern of selective breeding that is not natural (artificial) which select for certain traits
- humans are changing other species like plants and animals
in what ways do species change over time? (3)
- domestication
- some animals go extinct (found as fossils)
- some extinct animals are similar to living animals
how is evolution gradual? (3)
- Small changes over time
- Grades (steps)
- If the earth is millions of years old, there is plenty of time
why is wild mustard significant?
many vegetables are domesticated and descended from it
why are plesiosaurs interesting?
this animal is strikingly different from all living animals now
why are ichthyosaurs interesting?
they are an extinct reptile that looks very similar to dolphins now
in the history of earth when did the oldest surviving rock come to be known?
about march
in the history of earth where are the oldest shelled fossils?
about Nov 10
in the history of earth where is the first fish known?
about Nov 22
in the history of earth when are the first land plants and animals arising?
about Nov 28th
in the history of earth where do dinosaurs first appear? When do they go extinct?
- about Dec 13th
- about Dec 26 in the evening
(also has the most living species now –birds)
in the history of earth when do mammals first appear?
Dec 14
in the history of earth when do hominids appear?
Dec 31 in the evening
why are Archaeopteryx interesting?
they are the closest relatives to all living birds now
- early form of plumage
- Dinosaurs existed very long ago which allowed for them to have more time to diverge and evolve into new species still seen today
what are properties of natural selection? (4)
- Variation
- Differential reproduction
- Heritability
- Adaptations
T/F more animals are born than survive to reproductive age?
True
T/F some individuals are better at surviving and reproducing?
True
- These individuals will leave more descendants who will inherit their advantageous traits
adaptation
something that helps the organisms survive and reproduce
how does evolution cause speciation?
Eventually accumulating change interfere with reproduction among new descendant populations
- when these different species come back in contact they cannot produce viable offspring
species
a group of organisms that breed and produce fertile offspring ⇒ there are different ways to address this question
biological species concept
individuals that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring constitute a species ⇒ exceptions where different species hybridize
T/F evolution happens to individuals not populations?
False
- evolution happens to populations not individuals
Sympatric speciation
when a barrier that separates a population occurs and the two groups accumulate different adaptations, they become different species
- Different enough it hinders reproduction when they come into contact again
- The populations are near one another but don’t actually meet
Sympatric speciation
animals are in the same environment but there are other reasons that individuals stop mingling with one another
- Use of different resources
why do populations that are close to one another not merge into 1 species?
Different environmental factors selecting for different traits and creating different pressures
- instead they differ into subspecies that look similar and behave similar but are not identical
Ring species (3)
- adjacent subspecies can interbreed
- Subspecies at ends of ring cant interbreed
- Small changes eventually lead to speciation
what was the last common ancestor between homo and pon genus’
hominidae
- trace back relationships among any two species living or extinct on earth was started by Carl Linnaeus
T/F can we draw phylogeny trees for language?
True
- languages descend from earlier languages
- Where the language is going thats where the people are going
how was Darwinism related to descent and classification
Darwin’s theory explained why Linneaus and others could classify species with a hierarchical system
- Members of a given group were related by descent
- Members within a group were related by more recent descent
who was Thomas Henry Huxley and what did he do?
worked under Darwin as a comparative anatomist
- Found many similarities between great apes and humans
- Established that no human race is closer to the apes than any other
- Identified similarities between lobe finned fishes and tetrapods
- First to propose that birds evolved from dinosaurs
characteristics off Gibbon monkeys
very long arms ⇒ likely because they lived in the trees
- Used their fingers as a hook
- Their scapulas are shaped so that they can comfortably hang
characteristics of orano monkeys
larger jaw and larger forearms
- Tells us this animal is robust ⇒ likely need to crack open nuts or seeds or other foods that are more dense
characteristics of Gorillas
- hunched over and have a thick jaw as well as a long pelvis
- Their thumb on their feet is widely spread from their toes ⇒ aids climbing even though they spend most of their time on the ground
- The upper part of their spine is very long and thick and their brain case is relatively small
- have large bones which support their body
- barrel shaped rib cage because they have more internal organs (long GI system for nutrient extraction )
what is different about human guts?
humans have offloaded some of the costs by cooking which reduces pathogens
- we have reduced gut length which leaves less time for nutrients to be taken out
if we evolved from apes then why are there still apes?
We did not evolve from modern apes
- Men and modern apes share a common ancestor which is extinct
- There is nothing in evolutionary theory which states a source population must go extinct in order for new species to evolve
what did Darwin find in the Galapagos?
the islands were close to one another but had subtle variations and thus the animals looked very different amongst them
- iguanas that foraged in the ocean (marine), on land, etc.
Who was Alfred Russel Wallace?
naturalist working in the Amazon and in Malay Archipelago (Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, New Guinea)
- Independently developed idea of natural selection while in a malarial fever
- In 1858 enthusiastically wrote to Darwin about it
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