ANTH 1120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Recapitulation Theory, James Hutton, Symmetry In Biology
28 Oct 2016
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Anth 1120 lecture 3: genetics & arguments for evolution. Vestigial structures: pancreas, tail-bone, wisdom teeth from a time when we had wider jaws, bad knees and hips, tonsils, body hair, nipples on men, whales can be born sometimes with hind legs. Molecular biology: share more than 98% of dna with chimps, chromosome #2 formed by 2 operate chromosomes. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: sperm and egg form cells that become an embryo and so on. Families, orders, class, phylum, genus, and species. Species boundary is de ned by the ability of individuals to produce fertile offspring. Author suggests that genus and species can be de ned by morphology: a bird has wings and hollow bones. More recently phylogenetics has been focused on evolutionary ancestry. Marsupials 140 million years later kangaroos, mammals with pouches. Grasping hands and feet with ngernails rather than claws. We have lost our grasping feet once we adopted bipedalism. Stereoscopic vision 3-dimensional perception is a result of forward-facing eyes.
