Reflection of the Story of the Human Body
by Daniel E. Lieberman
Have you ever wondered how humans evolved from apes? From this book we learned that there is a very complex story behind this evolution including many points about teeth, brain, bipedalism, and other body parts.
The book demonstrates evolution using an example of teeth and brain by explaining how teeth have evolved from being very large and strong to being smaller and more precise. This happened because originally they had to eat hard foods such as bark and tubers(thick part of stems) so they needed larger teeth. However, later on, they learned how to process foods before they ate them so in this circumstance big teeth weren’t as necessary. One interesting fact about teeth is that you spend less than half an hour per day chewing.The brains have increased in size over time. The brain was smaller because we did not have to exercise our brain thinking as much. It got bigger as we faced more complex challenges and had to adjust which helped to developing a bigger sized brain.
Another main point of the book was bipedalism and how the evolution of different body parts helped to achieve that. An example of these body parts are our hips and feet (specifically arches). Our hips now face forward more and the arches of our feet help us to walk long distances. Bipedalism helped early hominins to stay cool(less surface area touched by the sun) and walk further in order to find food.
The last main point of the book is how the food we eat and the choices we make affect our body greatly. Back then, their main food were fruits and they didn’t eat or do anything harmful so they had a very healthy body. As they evolved throughout the centuries, they started to find other foods and harmful behaviors such as tobacco. Also, these days, many people eat fast food very often which can lead to cancer. The reckless activities such as bungee jumping and sitting too much during the day have negative effects on your body.
This book filled us with a lot of interesting knowledge but we wouldn’t recommend this book if you are a weak reader or if you are not interested in ecology. We believe this because there are many complex words and it is a little unexciting to read if you are not enthralled by ecology. One of the most positive aspects of this book was the diagrams and images which clearly demonstrated the points of the book. In conclusion, this book was very informative and highly recommended for all who are interested in ecology but not as recommended for high school students who may not be as interested.
Socratic Seminar Review
Two things I learned during the Socratic Seminar were that there is an alternative theory about evolution and that they are working on way to prove that theory. Before the Socratic Seminar I barely even knew that Creationism existed, let alone what it really meant so it was very interesting to hear the other theory that we aren't taught in school. It was also interesting to see that there are many studies into Creationism and not just Evolution because I knew very little about Creationism in the first place. There are also two things that I would like to have said. One is that I didn't believe one of the pieces of evidence that was given because it said that scientists found bone marrow from a long time ago but I didn't think that bone marrow fossilized and therefore it wouldn't last very long after the organism died. The second thing that I would've liked to have said is that I don't understand how people can argue for one side or the other because no one actually knows what truly happened, so you can't honestly tell one person that they are wrong or you are right because we don't yet have a way to know for sure.
Overall Reflection
Two things that I did well in this unit were cooperation and work ethic. Two things that I could've done better were time-management and reading/watching the instructions more closely. In this unit our group was very good at cooperating because we all got along pretty well. We were always able to put our head together and make a group decision. We had good work ethic as well because we were able to assign tasks to everyone in the group and we were always working very hard during class. We could've managed our time better because we were always the last ones done with dissections and most of our projects were completed just in the nick of time. This is because sometimes we spent too much time on little details and didn't keep our time limit in mind. We should've read the directions more closely because especially on the dissections because we often got too excited and just wanted to dissect. Therfore, we didn't get a chance to watch all the dissection videos and thoroughly read the instructions.
Transitional Species Video
https://youtu.be/0Gsb0gO5VJk