BIOL 350 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1-12: Time Preference, Spoken Language, Nomadic Pastoralism
2 Jun 2018
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Chapter 1 - What Have We Done?
• Silent Spring (Rachel Carson), The Population Bomb (Paul Ehrlich), and Tragedy of Commons
(Garrett Hardin).
• Only 3% of the earth's surface can grow food.
• Mineral ores can only be recycled, not regenerated.
o Silver and gold are expected to run out in the middle of the century.
• Forests provide fuel, fibre, and lumber.
• Fish landings have increased five-fold over the second half of the last century.
• Water usage increased ten-fold during the last century.
o Mostly from agriculture irrigation and industry.
• Pesticides ruin soil biodiversity.
• Main reason why we won't leave fossil fuels in the ground:
o Feeding the rapid growing numbers of malnourished and starving people on the planet
will require massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticide production, which also depends
on petro-chemicals.
• Problems of outputs:
o Pollution.
o Climate change:
• Extreme weather causes losses in human life, disease outbreaks and rising health
costs, and property damage around the globe.
• Ocean life is threatened from rising acidity and crop losses escalate from more
frequent droughts.
o Waste - especially plastic waste in the ocean.
o Mass extinction.
• Human Development Index (life expectancy, literacy and education, and per capita GDP).
• Impact of humans on the degradation of ecosystem services:
o Population size + affluence + technology.
• We need 1.5 earths to be sustainable.
Chapter 2 - A Primer on Evolutionary Roots
• Biological evolution is defined in terms of change in gene frequencies, and hence change in the
genetic constitution of a population, which results when different genes, or forms of genes
(alleles) are copied and transmitted (by reproduction) into future generations at different
frequencies.
o Evolutionary fitness, therefore, really refers to genetic fitness.
Chapter 3 - Becoming Human
• Share common ancestor with chimpanzees from about 7 million years ago.
find more resources at oneclass.com
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• 3 immediate challenges for early humans on the African savannah were:
o Temperature regulation in the open sun.
o Greater vulnerability to large predators.
o Much scarcer food supply of fruit and other plant foods.
• Advantages of bipedalism:
o More elevated posture lead to better view of landscape.
o Greater efficiency for long-distance walking and running.
o Lower danger of heat stroke due to reduced surface exposed.
o Free arms for carrying food and free hands for making tools.
o Free hands for better communication.
• Increased meat consumption also provided an important secondary advantage - large
intestinal tracts became less necessary, so more nutrition allocated to larger brains.
o Carnivores also need better social skills for cooperation.
• Bipedalism did shrink size of birth canal though.
o May explain why we're less developed straight out of the womb.
• Potentially started using fire as homo erectus 1 million years ago.
o Good for warmth, social skills, warning off predators, teaching, group identity, etc.
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Chapter 4 - Discovery of Self (pgs. 39-46)
• Self-awareness (enlightenment) period around 40-50000 years ago.
• A conscious species has what is called 'theory of mind': an ability to compare oneself to one's
own standard and to other people, and to infer the mental states of others by extrapolating
from one's own private experiences.
• We became ever more skilled experts at cooperation, negotiation, and teamwork, and at the
same time, masters of manipulation, deception, cheating, and lying.
• Advantage:
o Ability to communicate more accurately with others, and thus manage our affairs with
them more efficiently.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Impact of humans on the degradation of ecosystem services: population size + affluence + technology, we need 1. 5 earths to be sustainable. Chapter 5 - the march of progress (pgs. 47-72: neanderthals left africa 200000 years earlier, had two disadvantages, no division of labour, lacked tools for killing animals at a distance. Standard social science model and tabula rasa: we and we alone are the arbiters of our own minds, evolutionary science model takes into account this but also genetics, prepared learning. Found variation in musical expression/talent is not just a product of social learning; it also has a conspicuous genetic component: examples of genetic legacy, spoken language, symbolic thinking, expression of mathematics. Could not develop a fully fledged culture in their life times: adults and all of their cultural paraphernalia are indeed necessary for the ontogenetic development of skills and collective intentionality. Leisure drive is the second intermediary to legacy drive: epicureanism - the "pleasure principle" of freudian psychology.
