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cmcgowan's picture

I really enjoyed discussion

Submitted by cmcgowan on Sun, 10/07/2007 - 12:34pm.
I really enjoyed discussion this week because it clarified a topic that I always found out-putting. Before this class, evolution was always described to me as "survival of the fittest." For some reason this phrase has become the universal phrase associated with evolution and it never really made sense to me. I always thought there was something more that needed to be said. I like the idea of describing evolution as a combination of descent with variation and natural selection.  I think it makes a lot more sense than "survival of the fittest." It seems to me that people have always understood survival of the fittest as it relating to individual organisms, but I don't think that is how it supposed to be understood. I think it is more the survival of genes by reproducing successfully and I really don't understand where "the fittest" is supposed to apply. I don't think that there is one characteristic or even a few characteristics that we could use to determine fitness in this sense. 

I have realized this week how humanocentric a lot of science is. I think that we often just assume that we as humans are the most superior forms of life when really we have no concrete evidence to prove that. I like the idea that we are not better in a biologocal sense just because we are more complex than other species, although it is a bit unnerving to realize that humans are not the culmination point of evolution. It is especially unnerving because I will never get to know what comes after us...

In the past whenever I read news articles about scientests discovering new species, I never really realized what that meant about the whole grand scheme of evolution and diversity.  I think my general reaction was "How many more species can they really discover? Can there really be that many left?"  I realize now how ignorant those thoughts were. Scientests will never stop discovering new species because new species will never stop being created. We will never be able to have concrete answers for what life is and we will never be able to reduce our knowledge of species to a single number. Life will never stop changing and diversity will never stop expanding and branching out. I like this. 

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