Darwin, Freud and the Pope Walk Into a Bar..

     On today's  addition of Darwin, Freud, and the Pope Walk Into a Bar..We are reflecting upon my journey in this course thus far.      Evolution is one of those wonderfully not so simple, complex, mechanisms that rules in our universe each and everyday.  I was skeptic, as I truly didn't know  what I was getting myself into. And I  hadn't the slightest clue as to what evolution truly entailed beyond D arwin's  Theory of Evolution. A fter taking science courses that essentially built upon one another, I thought to myself "what an odd switch up," when I enrolled. But boy was I in for a delightful surprise!       Shockingly, I immediately unearthed  the interconnectedness between evolution and all other sciences I had studied in the past 3 years. Science and science-based technologies have transformed modern life. They have led to major improvements in living standards, public welfare, health, and securi...

On today's addition of Darwin, Freud, and the Pope Walk Into a Bar...We discuss the topic of inbreeding.     When we think of the term 'inbreeding' what unconsciously comes to mind first? Do we think of the Hollywood stereotype? Or do we think of lions who mate with their parents, siblings, and offspring?     Inbred people are depicted as psychotic, physically deformed individuals who are, more often than not, cannibals living in the Southern United States. The reality involves less murder and doesn't involve anyone to move to Texas. ' Inbreeding' is the mating of organisms closely related by ancestry. It goes against the biological aim of mating, which is the shuffling of DNA. Genes determine different aspects of your appearance, like hair and eye color, as well as biological factors such as blood type. Example time, the gene for brown eyes is dominant and so having just one of these in a pair will result in your eyes being brown. However, the gene for blue eye...

     On today's addition of Darwin, Freud, and the Pope Walk Into a Bar...We are going to discuss the all time big debate of evolution vs. religion.       Evolutionary biology has been and continues to be a cornerstone of modern science. Some of these major contributions come from the understanding of evolution, modern medicine, developing agricultural products, and creating industrial innovations. More broadly, evolution is a core concept in biology that is based both in the study of past life forms and in the study of the relatedness and diversity of present-day organisms. In my previous post I had touched on this relatedness among all living organisms and the controversy that is brought along with this evolutionary idea. It is well known that many people continue to have questions about our knowledge of biological evolution. Believing that scientific understanding of evolution is incomplete, incorrect, or in doubt. They may begin to wonder if it is ...

    On today's addition of Darwin, Freud, and the Pope Walk Into a Bar...We will be discussing Darwin's idea that there is interconnectedness between species as they descended from common ancestors.    Over time there has been an overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence that supports the existence of the universal common ancestor of all extant life on Earth, it is still an open question whether the universal common ancestor existed or not. Most recently, Douglas Theobald, challenged this problem and came up with a few conservative assumptions to show that the probability that all living species descended from a universal common ancestor is infinitely higher than any other hypothesis, including those of multiple origins of the kingdoms (bacteria, eukarya, archaea) or of rampant horizontal gene transfer between species that would, by mixing genomes, make life look as though it had a single origin when it didn't. Douglas is able to provide evidence;...

       On today's addition of Darwin, Freud, and the Pope Walk Into a Bar...We will be discussing the idea of evolution, more specifically whether Darwin's idea falls into the category of "theory" or "fact?"       First and foremost, any good researcher or even scientist needs to define the given terms before speculating or hypothesizing. So, what exactly is evolution? To keep it short and sweet, biological evolution is the change in organisms over time. Now these changes can either be small or large depending on our ability to measure and detect these fluctuations. Small changes include alterations in genetic makeup from one generation to the next (also known as allele frequency change), whereas large changes can show how species gradually become increasingly different from their ancestors (also known as descent with modification).        With this idea of evolution in our head, we are now able to dive a bit deeper into o...

       Who am I? Well I can state the obvious first. My name is Courtney Jones and I grew up in the city of Shawnee, KS. The next question posed, "where do you hope to go?" is very simple but the answers are never so. We've been asked this question since elementary school but as I got older the answer varied from professional chef to professional athlete to whatever the most exciting new adventure was at the time. While I am certainly no professional chef, one thing I do know is that life doesn't ever go according to plan. The things we dreamt about as kids may fade, but we're still focused on becoming something. It's interesting to find the question asking about "hope" instead of "want." Want is a desire, wish, longing while hope is the feeling of trust. People can want an abundance of finances or want to be successful in life but hope is not tied to a particular outcome rather the belief that there is potential for something good to happe...