Lauren Leiker Evolution Course Blog

     This semester has been nothing short of a wild evolutionary rollercoaster. Some of my perceptions of evolution have changed over the past months, including on how intrinsic evolution truly is. When I first thought of evolution I simply thought back to the standard pictures of an ape evolving into a man. However, now when I think of evolution I have to think about the deeper layers within the concepts of evolution such as mutations, natural selection, and even fitness. I don’t believe my perceptions of the process of science has changed because I always understood how complex science can be.   One thing I have really learned in this course was how to code. During the first week of this class, I truly doubted my abilities to code. I was nervous because I didn’t have much faith in myself given I have never coded before in my life, however, by the end of the semester, I can say with confidence that I proved myself wrong. I have gained more knowledge with coding, a...

      For this blog post, I decided to write about Rachel Carlton Abrams Ted Talk that is over (R)evolutionary Medicine. She first starts her talk explaining a simple prescription that we can help us in our daily lives. That simple prescription revolves around getting into alignment with our evolutionary nature. She states how there is a split between the life and environment that we have evolved to thrive in and the life and environment that majority of us are living in. She begins to worry me with the statement how that for the first time in our country, our children are expected to have shorter life spans due to the exposure to diseases of civilization. You would think with the amount of technology and resources we have nowadays, children would be expected to live longer and healthier lives than their parents. She explains how children will suffer from high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and high cholesterol.       So in order to solve this issu...

     For my blog post this week, I decided to write about the evolutionary perspective on human health and disease. I found a Ted Talk given by Lara Durgavich where she investigates a genetic disorder known as Tay-Sachs disease. She explains how Tay-Sachs disease is when one of the two copies of chromosome 15 has a genetic mutation. Even though Lara herself still has one normal copy of this gene, she states how she is still a carrier, meaning she can pass the mutation onto her children. Luckily, her husband does not carry this mutation and her children turned out healthy.   Lara shows how the perspective of evolutionary medicine examines the how and why of a human’s evolutionary past. She states that our past can leave our bodies vulnerable to different diseases. One central idea that I learned through Lara’s Ted Talk was that you must understand that your health is not only affected by what your body is going through now, but also because of your genetic inheritan...