Tuesday 22 October 2013

Questions- USING a PDF (for REFS), that I will upload, as well as 5 academic sources. APA style

Questions- USING a PDF (for REFS), that I will upload, as well as 5 academic sources. APA style
Paper instructions:
MUST USE PDF, so if you don’t plan on reading it, it’s short- don’t apply for this, because I NEED refs from it, as well as 5 other online acedemic soures (INCLUDING PAGE NUMBERS, or in the case of my PDF SLIDE NUMBERS)
Question 1)
Recall from the lecture on Evolution and Natural Selection that Evolutionary Biologists are unsure whether the process of evolution occurs via very gradual, incremental changes, as was traditionally thought, or whether it occurs via relatively rapid, major changes; Punctuated Equilibrium. If it occurs as slow incremental changes would it be reasonable to expect a new genus Homo to suddenly appear? The idea that, within the hominin line, there might have suddenly evolved a brand new genus fits better with the idea of Punctuated Equilibrium. However, also keep in mind that not all the remains of individuals of a species will end up as fossils for us to discover. In fact, it is likely that a very, very small percentage ever become fossils and an even smaller percentage survive buried in sediments long enough for us to dig them up. Since we are never going to find example fossils of every stage along the evolutionary history of a genus, it is not surprising that we seem to find the remains of individuals that are significantly different from related individuals that date to an immediately preceding time period. Do you think the early species of Homo that we have discovered so far (habilis and rudolfensis) are good examples of Punctuated Equilibrium? If they are, can you think of any characteristic(s) of these species that might explain such a sudden, major change in hominin morphology?
Question 2)
) This section more than any other in the course deals with those traits that we traditionally see as what define us as ‘human’: large, complex brains and their associated intellectual capabilities; walking erect on our legs, and hairlessness. (Some might also add culture as a defining trait, although by any anthropological definition of culture, chimpanzees and bonobos share this trait.) Among physical anthropologists and paleoanthropologists there is no set criteria for the use of the term ‘human’; no definition has ever been put forward for it within the sciences, and different researchers seem to apply it differently. That is, they seem to draw the line between what they would consider “human” and what they would consider “pre-human” at different places in our evolutionary history. Some researchers would include Australopithecines in the ‘human’ category, while others don’t even include our closest cousins, the Neandertals, as ‘humans’. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a ‘human’ as a member of the species Homo sapiens, but since there is constantly significant debate among physical anthropologists and paleoanthropologists (who are the ones who ultimately define the taxon Homo sapiens) this dictionary definition is essentially meaningless. In this light, where would you draw the line between human and non-human?
Because we don’t have a good working definition for the term ‘human’ this is an entirely subjective exercise – there is no right answer but it tends to indicate either your approach to classifying things, or your view on the importance of distinguishing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom.
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