Wow! We are half way through the semester already! I would say it has gone by slow, but that would be a lie. It's crazy how time flies. Hopefully the second half of the semester will go as well as the first half did. When looking back over these past few weeks on what I have learned in this class, I have learned more than I would have originally thought, (I believed I would be really confused the entire time and not understand the material). 1. I am not a coder, nor will I ever claim to be. 2. However, coding isn't toooo terribly bad! Once you have a concept down, it gets easier to replicate it. 3. I understand the topic of evolution much better.
When looking back at my first blog post, I defined evolution as occuring when an inheritable trait passes across generations. I also said that evolution could not happen to an individual, and that factors such as genetic drift, natural selection, and genetic mutation all can play a part in it. Now, with a better understanding of evolution, I would say that my definition was ok, but there could have been more added onto it. For example, evolution can differ on size (microevolution vs macroevolution), natural selection perhaps plays the biggest role in evolution, (this can be argued against), and that the rate of which an organism evolves really depends on its environment. Even though I feel like I have gained a greater understanding of evolution as a whole, there are still some topics that I struggle with. I mentioned above that I have problem with coding sometimes. I also have trouble with comprehending allele frequencies and what exactly they mean. This made interpreting the graphs on R especially hard for me personally, as it just seemed to look like a bunch of numbers.
Now that I have studied some of the basic concepts of evolution, I have had two questions pop up into my mind in class.
1. What would it take for evolution to be made a fact and not just a well proven theory?
2. How could knowledge of evolution help us with a natural resources problem? I don't know if these two things even connect, but it would be cool if evolution could help out!
I look forward to perhaps getting to answer these questions! I have learned a ton in this class, and I hope to continue to do so.
Emmary, I really enjoyed getting to read your latest blog post! Not to mention that the question you had asked about evolution and natural resources is such a vital one. As someone who is very interested in our planet's natural resources, I decided to dive deeper into the subject. After doing some thinking and a little bit of research, I had found that researchers have already created an organism that eats plastic when it's in the ocean. Overtime, if this bacteria continually favored eating plastic, then the ocean pollution problem could be mitigated even faster! I believe that this scenario provides an example of the opportunity that is there for other organisms to do something similar within our local natural resources.
ReplyDeleteHi Emmary!
ReplyDeleteI loved your questions at the end of your post! Especially the second question. When I think of evolution, I automatically think of animals and plants, but I didn't even think of how it could potentially solve prevalent world problems like limited natural resources? Great work making it halfway through the semester!