Lecture 1/2 Flashcards
introduction to biological anthropology, evolutionary theorists
What is biological anthropology
scientific study of humankind as on variety of animal among many, as living beings who’s intention on conception is to be born, become sexually mature, find am ate, reproduce, grow old, and die.
Variation
observable differences within a class of objections, the source may be genetic or environmental or both in interaction
What are features of a human that make us human?
bipedalism, clavicle, 5 digits, opposable thumb that can be used in a unique way, culture, complex thinking, self aware that we are humans and we will die
Who are humans closest relatives?
Chimps and baboons
What is vasovagal syncope?
emotionally triggered daunting when the parasympathetic system acts instead of the sympathetic nervous system and causes a drop in HR, BP,
benefits to fainting
reboot the system
Tachycardia
sympathetic nervous system - increased heart rate
Bradycardia
parasympathetic nervous system - decreased heart rate
Anthropology is devised into what subcategories?
biological, cultural, linguistic, applied, archeology
Franz Boas
He created the 4 field approach in anthropology, was rejected by Edward Taylor and Lewis Morgan regarding culture
Cultural Relativity: understand other premises of their own culture you must adopt and perceive the natives point of view to understand culture.
Studied the head and skull size which is called craniometry
biological potential is not a fixed entity - depends on the environment
Helped discover Eugenics - true breeding of a species, eliminating the groups that are not as much as wanted in efforts to improve human kind.
What is culture?
primary means by which humans adapt to their environment and represents learned behaviours and symbols that allow people to live in groups. Life characteristics of a particular human group or society
How do we incorporate culture
Learning through interaction, integrating, sharing tradition, rules, and appreciating maintain culture, symbols like language which we only have the innate capacity to understand symbols, encompassing - culture is everything, it permeates the human condition from top to bottom
How is culture both adaptive and maladaptive
Adaptive - allows humans to change in ways that allows them to survive, live in larger groups, and create a surplus of food.
Maladaptive - susceptible to disease, enacting violence, social hierarchies, intense labor, measles, anthrax
Name 3 other things that culture is
always changing, contested (always challenging certain ways to do things and to find different ways), and material
What is micro culture?
microculture is cultures within a culture, they can have their own languages, symbols, expectations within their smaller group
Bronislaw Malinowski
Worked in New gunia and Trobriand islands
Functionalism: social practices could be explained by their capacity to satisify particular biological needs, there are rules about living and dying
Said the only way to understand culture is through participant observation - being a participant within a culture in order to understand cultural norms and taboos
Cultural taboos
rigidly expressed in areas of biological needs like eliminating bodily functions, who to mate with, when to mate, where to have offspring mature, how to raise offspring. They are rules of society that ensure you belong.
Mary Douglas
Purity and Danger
Wrote a book on the abominations of leviticus, had things categorized if you were an organism in the water you were a fish with fins and or scales, if you were an organism on earth, you were flesh with four legs, claws, and a terrestrial animal, if you were firmament you were an organism in the air you had feathers. If you were organisms that were in this category but didn’t have the proper feature you were considered and abomination, example is a snake that has scales but doesn’t live in the water, Bat flies in the air but has fur.
Classification using the abominations of leviticus
Rules and arrangements for defining the world, identifying and instance of something, and defining the relationships between different categories
Simple: is, is not an animal
Complex: qualities are attributed that are not directly related to the animal, ie: dog is compassionate, loyal, friendship.
Heroduts
philosopher that wrote about how the Greece fought off the Persians twice. He wanted to express that society was a certain way in Greece and that is why they were able to fight off the Persians (a very very strong society)
Sima Qian
astrologer that wrote about how there was a time before us that didn’t live like us, they would make items out of stone then get buried with stone, then it changed to bronze and buried with bronze and now items are made out of iron and we are buried with iron.
Heraclitus
things are never the same, they are always in the state of FLUX
uses the river analogy, there is always a river with water there but the water that is there is never the water that was there before although it looks like it is, the water is always flowing.
World today does not equal world tomorrow
Artistole
static and hierarchal and that the hierarchy went from simple to complex, (dirt, rocks, plants, animals, humans, angelic beings, God)
Uses the horse analogy that we see different perceptions of the horse to be small, brown, black but that is just our own perception of the world, when it reality it is just a horse and has always been a horse.
does not believe in evolution, the world is the same as how it started.
Plato’s cave
Prisoners in a cave only had a flame so they could only see the shadow within the cave, then one escaped and saw the real world but couldn’t explain it to the rest of the prisoners because their perception of the world is just that it was shadows.
Greater Chain of being
God is the creator and he is the most complex, angelic beings, humans, animals, plants, rocks, dirt.
No evolution
European Maritime Exploration
Boat exploration lead to spiked evolutionary thought as the explorers ran into exotic animals that had similar blueprint to other known animals but some modifications to their phenotype.
Give an example on how we integrate culture
After WW2 women started to enter the workforce and so the market started to aim towards women’s work attire, food that was quick to make as the woman was not at home to cook, architecture of the houses were different - the kitchen was in the public areas for entertainment and where people congregate vs before WW2 where they were in the very back and hidden
Cultural Anthropology
focuses on comprehending the meanings and origins of social and cultural complexity through ethnography
how humans adapt to their environment and represents learned behaviours and symbols that allow people to live in groups
Linguistic Anthropology
examines the origin, structure and evolution of languages, relationships among them, social use of language in managing human affairs
Holism
Integrated study of all aspects of human life, biological, cultural, historical, indoor to develop a comprehensive view of the human condition
Biocultural Perspective
culture has been influence by biological variation acting as a mediator of individuals and their environment
Applied anthropology
applies anthropology knowledge to challenges arising from intricacies and inequity of human relationships, seen in forensics
Paleoanthropology
study of human evolution as represented in fossil remains of our hominid ancestors and those of our primate relatives
Human biology
studies modern population diversity, historical antecedents and its relationship to the lived environment
What and who we are in the context of where and when we are
Anthropometry
comparative studies of weigh, height, muscle and fat mass
Molecular Anthropology
study of population diversity at the level of genes and its products
DNA and genomics are comparative and evolutionary study of genomes of difference species
Functional genomics
study of dynamic actions and interactions of genes and proteins
Can look at cancer and cardiovascular disease within this study
Primatology
study of morphology, behaviour and evolution of nonhuman primates
We study this because we can then study ourselves as we are closely related
Keystone Species
A species whose ecological role produces a disproportional impact on it’s environment, including status of other species
Loss of keystone species has deleterious consequences for the local system
Geocentrism
earth is the centre of the universe and all other planets orbit around it.
Essentialism
what exists in the world and is experienced by human and their senses is an imperfect representation of an underlying, perfect, immutable (not changing) idea or essence
Material objects were variable and subject to change
Forms of objects could only be perceived by the mind and were perfect in every regard
Plato!
Heliocentrism
The sun is the centre of the universe and we and every other planet revolve around it.
Earth is tilted on an axis which gives us day vs. night.
Paradigm shifts (there is 3)
1) Time (age of earth and processes that shape it)
2) Awareness of diversity - taxonomy, ecology, biogeography
3) Biological change - organisms are mutable
Uniformitarianism
change that happened to the earth in the past is still consistently happening to the earth now. Natural processes that have remained constant through geographical time (this makes mountains, oceans, riverbeds)
through the forces of wind, erosion, and volcanic activity
Supported by Charles Lyell originally discovered by James Hutton
Georges Cuvier
believes that catastrophes cause extinction and then the neighbouring organisms populations start to migrate which is how new species come into the area, and that they all had the same original blueprint so that is why they looked similar
Variation was not important to consider because a catastrophe would wipe out the species anyways
Palaeontology - looked at extinct animals fossils
How are humans classified
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Genus: Homo
Species: Sapiens
Binomeial nomenclature
two name system is the combination fo genus and species
Humans are homosapiens
Comte de buffon
1st to explain biological variation, similarities and differences between species and the natural history of species
pangenesis: discredited theory that the environment influences cells to change and that change gets put into the sex cells which is passed onto the next generation
organisms are able to transform as environmental circumstances alter through time or migration
Environment influences a species to change traits to those that are favourable, they will then become dominant and passed on in sex cells
Other environments can influence the opposite and suppress those traits that have become dominant in another environment
Environment shapes species accordingly but species were fixed
TRANSMUTATION: no evolution
Microevolution
small changes to the allele frequencies within a population that is passed onto the next few generations
no speciation, can sometimes lead to evolution but not very common
Macroevolution
large changes to a population of species that leads to speciation and formation of a higher taxonomy category
Biological Species Concept (BSC)
species is defined on the bases of reproductive inclusion within its members and reproductive isolation from other species
Law of Disuse and Use
Lamarck’s law
States that with the use and disuse of parts of the organisms that reflects its needs and circumstances of the environment will cause the part to develop or reduce accordingly
Law of inheritance of acquired characteristics
Lamarck’s second law
Those changes resulting from the disuse and use law will be transmitted to the offspring, only if both parents had consistency with the part in question
3 Criterira of Lamarck’s laws
1) Environments change and so the organisms needs change in order to live in harmony within the environment
2) Organism changes its behaviour and habits
3) Behavioural changes alter physiological structures to develop or reduce which is called anatomical modification
Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace
both were studying non random survival of the fittest and competition within species promoting reproductive success
wanted to understand variation between species and understand geographical variation within species
could not account for heritability of traits, just why there was variability
4 elements to Natural Selection
1) All populations of a species and all individuals within the populations vary in behaviour, shape, size, color etc
2) All populations have potential to reproduce at a higher rate than the rate of resources being available (food, space, mates)
3) There is competition for the resources that are now limited, the competition is between different species and members within the same species
4) Characteristics that help win the resources in competition are then heritable to offspring in order to increase the likelihood of reproductive success
John Ray
defined biological species as a group of plants that spring from seeds that is like another seed and will produce a structure that is the same as the plants that have bore the seed
taxonomic system to organize the natural world of plants
historia plantarum
Karl Von Linne
Botanist/zoologist
how the natural world was organized, god creates, linneaus organizes
1758 - progenitor of taxonomic system that we use today
put humans in the Order: Primates and divided us into 4 subspecies with different characteristics like industrious and greedy
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
socialist
humans in a natural state we are pure and would have no violence, be self sufficient, modest and live in harmony
Society is the reason that we are greedy and have social discontent
Humans are very alturistic like baboons but can be aggressive like chimps.
Hobbes
complete opposite or Rousseau he thinks that humans are inevitably bad and corrupt and we need a leviathan to give order and live in harmony
Eramus Darwin
Charles Darwin's grandfather 3 objects of desire 1) lust: the need to mate and reproduce 2) Hunger: the need to eat 3) Security: the need to stay alive these 3 things are struggles for individuals and cause competition
Lamarck
Law of disuse and use
Law of inheritance of acquired characteristics
lay out a theory of descent/evolution as independent scientific theory
was deemed as wrong
Thomas Malthus
political and economical thinker
human population grew only if there was sufficient amounts of food to feed the population.
However when excess food grows, the population then grows, then society competes for food resources and the population then dies off
Malthusian economics: population will grow exponentially while food will grow linearly and cause competition for food then population will die off
Napolenic wars
1803-1815
french people were intellectual pursuits and cause political events to occur
David Livingstone
went on behalf of the Royal geographical society to source the Nile
got lost and rescued
Percy Fawcett
went on a voyage to brazil, peru, and bolivia
disappeared in the amazon jungle looking for the city of Z
Charles Lyell
Geologist
rediscovered uniformitarianism after James Hutton did
geological processes that have been observed in the present are those that occurred in the past in order to shape earth
Wind, erosion and volcanic activity were forces that acted upon the earth’s surface to make its landscape of mountains, river beds and seas.
Pleistocene: human tools were found in the brigham cave in 1858 in pleistocene strata
Pleistocene strata
made it aware that humans have been around for a much longer geographical time frame which allows for the earth to have the landscapes that it currently does in a timely manner
gave a sense of deep time, hat the world is a lot older than it was though to be
Charles Darwin
Went on Voyage of HMS Beagle to the Galapagos islands to study finches
observed that one island would have the same species of finch but a different variation of features
Was very confused so he collected a lot of data about the finches to study them
Came to the theory of Natural selection
1) no two individuals of the same species or different species will look the same
2) All species are capable of producing offspring at a faster rate than the available resources (food, space, mating)
3) There would be competition for the resources that are limited, there will be favourable traits that allow for survival of the species
4) Traits that lead to survival will be inherited by the next generation
overtime successful variations could produce a new species
Also contributed to the descent of man in the 1840s when the Neanderthal man was discovered
Alfred Wallace
Also was studying biology and natural history
went on a exploratory voyage and collected specimen
explained similarities and different within and between individuals and species
Paul du Chaillu
Was the first to confirm existence of the gorilla in Central America in 1860’s - helped support the descent of man theory
Thomas Huxley
Got natural selection put into the England education ciriculum after going on a voyage called HMS rattlesnake
Ernst Haeckel
Polygenist - that human subspecies evolved independently and had their own evolutionary history
Looked at embryos and noticed that they embryos of other species all looked the same during their development
embryonic development goes through the stages of evolution
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny
growth of an individual retraces growth of species and phyla of that taxonomic system
Missing link
Ernst Haeckel could identify 22 stages of the embryo development but was missing stage 21 which was between humans and primates
he said it would be a combination of an ape and human but it could not posses language
Believed it to be in asia, and he set off to asia to find the species and calls it homoerectus
Hebert Spencer
founder of “survival of the fittest” but he meant in societal implications not species implications
Why are some societies more technologically advanced and have socially evolved more quickly?
Social institutions were meant to represents organs and the social institutions that were more “fit” were more likely to reproduce like, monotheism (Only one god)
Used biological evolution from Darwin to explain social structure and norms
Edward Taylor and Lewis morgan
Rejected Franz Boas of cultural relativity
Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man
Unilineal Evolution
man was savagery, barbarian within civilization
this was rejected
Society did not evolve this way, there was social change and you had to understand societies from within
