biology

Seasonal Affective Disorder As a Result of the Lack of Sunlight?

In the neural system, each hemisphere of the brain corresponds to the opposite side of the body with one side being dominate. This inborn characteristic of the humans’ renders us lateralized because, for example, the dominance of the right cerebral is responsible for left- handedness and vice-versa. (1) A great majority of humans are right-handed, 85-90% while the remaining percentage is left-handed. (5) But why is there such an unequal distribution? This can be due in part by both social and consumer influences because they help finalize the handedness of a person. For the right-handed culture we live in has lead to many more individuals converting from left-handedness to right-handedness than to right-handedness to left. (16)

      Skin is the body’s largest organ and is very essential for our survival; it is what protects all our other organs from antigens that are detrimental to our health. The book Skin: A Natural History by Dr. Nina Jablonski is a very informative chronicle on how our skin protects us and at the same time allows the world to see one’s state of health, identity, and uniqueness.

I think the element of Biology 103 that I enjoyed most was its ability to answer all my ‘big questions.’ Before the course, I did not understand molecular evolution, the purpose of the scientific method, or how chemistry was connected to biology, and I left feeling pretty confident in my comprehension of these things. Because science is a loopy storytelling process, though, I was continually reassessing my ideas of what these processes meant, in particular, evolution. While our society’s great debate on evolution often hinges on the idea that evolution denies the ‘miraculous’ associated with a divine being (like that of creationism or intelligent design), the play between genes and environment and particularly  improbable assembly certainly seemed miraculous to me.

Introduction

Where do we get our religious concepts from? Why do some concepts, such as the existence of one God who knows all, the existence of souls, of an afterlife, of karma, and so forth pervade throughout the spiritual lives of very different people? Why do these concepts persist for thousands of years? How do these concepts gain a following? In Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought anthropologist Pascal Boyer attempts to answer these questions in terms of what we know about cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology (1). Where once it was believed that these were silly questions to ask, Boyer believes that we now have the tools to treat