Study Guide: Terms and Concepts Flashcards
Anthropology
Study of humankind, viewed from perspectives of all people and times.
Archaeology
Study of historic or pre-historic human populations through the analysis of material items.
Artifacts
Material objects from past cultures.
Holistic
Relating to or concerned w/ complete systems rather than w/ individual parts.
Ex: Engaging and developing the whole person
Linguistics
Study of language and its structure, including study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics.
Physical/Biological Anthropology
Physical: Science of human zoology, evolution, and ecology.
Biological: Comparing societies and cultures, looking at change over time, exploring human diversity.
Bio-cultural approach/Bio-cultural evolution
Approach: Interrelationship between what humans have inherited genetically and culture.
Evolution: Mutual, interactive evolution of human biology and culture; the concept that biology makes culture possible and that developing culture further influences the direction of biological evolution
Evolution
Process by which different kinds of living organisms are thought to have developed and diversified from earlier forms during the history of earth.
Paleoanthropology
Concerned w/ fossil hominids
Osteology
Structure and function of skeleton and bony structures
Primate
Chief bishop or archibishop of a province
Forensic Anthropology
Examination of human skeletal remains for law enforcement agencies to determine the identity of unidentified bones.
Lactose Intolerance
Inability to digest lactose–a sugar derived from milk, and dairy products.
Great chain of being = Great scale of being
Strict, religious hierarchical structure of all matter and life, believed to have been decreed by God.
Immutability of species
The idea that each individual specie on the planet was specially created by God and could never fundamentally change.
Fixity of species
All species remained unchanged throughout the history of earth.
Natural selection
The process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring.
Catastrophism
Theory that changes in the earth’s crust during geological history have resulted chiefly from sudden violent and unusual events.
Lamarckism
The idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it has required during its lifetime to its offspring.
Uniformitarianism
Was an assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe.
Differential Fertility
Variation in fertility of different groups or classes in the population.
Differential Mortality
All deaths reported in a given population
Fitness
Ability to survive to reproductive age, fine a mate, and produce offspring.
Fitness relative to environment
Organisms that produce more surviving offspring are more fit.
Binomial Nomenclature
Formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts.
Industrial Melanism
Prevalence of dark-colored varieties of animals in industrial areas where they are better camouflaged.
Ex: Moths
Microevolution
Evolutionary change within a species or small group of organisms.
Dominant
Powerful, or influential
Recessive
Relating to or denoting heritable characteristics controlled by genes that are expressed in offspring only when inherited by both parents.
Genotype
Genetic constitution of an individual organism
Phenotype
Set of observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype w/ the environment.
Punnet Square
Diagram used to predict an outcome of a particular cross or breeding experiment.
Heterozygous/heterozygote
Zygous: Pair of genes where one is recessive, and one is dominant.
Zygote: An individual having two different alleles of a particular gene or genes.
Homozygous/homozygote
Zygous: Pair of matching alleles
Zygote: An individual having two identical alleles of a particular gene or genes.