HomeWork HELP

[Sundae]

Ginger boy is still at home and you still love him?
Not a pointed question, I just need to keep up with your life.

I don't watch soap operas y'see

[Lamplighter]

Over the past 200 years, I'll bet that the women of Africa have evolved to almost
superhuman ability to make long, long trips barefooted with their babies
on their hips with little to no food or water...

All due to the internecine wars with modern weapons available over the internet.

Dawin did know what he was talking about.
.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Brianna

My son's bio prof asked that they write up a paragraph on how bio evolution has changed in the last 200 years. 200 years is NOTHING in bio evo. terms.

How humans have evolved in 200 years, or how humans' understanding of biological evolution has changed in the last 200 years?

[piercehawkeye45]

X-men.

[GunMaster357]

Investigations about the physical aspects of prehistoric men and women tend to show that their weight and height were similar to ours.

Yet, we're still evolving. May be this will help you.

[Sheldonrs]

Originally Posted by piercehawkeye45

X-men.

Sometimes evolution takes a giant leap.

[gvidas]

I've heard that the conditions on slave ships (extreme temperatures, no water/food) caused the people whose bodies did not retain salt well to die more frequently. Subsequently, African-American populations descended from slaves tend to retain salt well, resulting in a predisposition towards high blood pressure.

I've never taken any steps to verify if there's any truth there.

[Aliantha]

Maybe you should just shoot him down and explain that biological evolution does not occur unless there's some kind of cultural need and then show how our cultural evolution has led to biological evolution such as height and health issues?

Just a note here. max has a way to go on his cultural and biological evolution. He just whacked himself in the head with a guitar. Nice. lol

[Trilby]

Originally Posted by Sundae

Ginger boy is still at home and you still love him?
Not a pointed question, I just need to keep up with your life.

I don't watch soap operas y'see

Not Ginger Boy (who, yes, is at home and driving me crazy with his issues) but Son Number One who is at OSU in Columbus.

[ZenGum]

As already noted, we have used our inventions to shield us from the effects of savage nature and our own individual defects. We have cleaned our water, defeated predators, immunised our young, worn glasses, used insulin, used IVF, and treated other diseases as they arose.
As a result, people who would otherwise have died before reproducing can now live and breed, and so our gene pool has become more varied and less "fit" in the sense of surviving without such support. Since we have such support, we are "fit" for our present environment.

While we have introduced a large number of new risk factors (obesity, corn sugar, tobacco) these generally don't bite until after you've had a chance to breed, so their selective impact is minimal.

Especially during WWI and WWII, we sent millions of our healthiest males off to die, and the physically imperfect were kept at home and are more likely to have bred. This would be outright disgenics (opposite of eugenics) but the numbers of deaths in those wars (say, 50 million total) isn't really that much in a world of billions.

Especially in the last 50 years, there has been more mixing of previously (relatively) isolated gene pools. Afro-Italian, Chinese-Hispanic, etc. I don't know if this makes much difference.

In the last 20 years, genetic counselling may have reduced the occurance of some genetic conditins, but only for the wealthy and I suspect the overall effect of this would be minimal.