ANTH-101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Dark Skin, Lactase, Craniometry
Document Summary
Explore human biological diversity using polymorphic alleles and private polymorphisms in relation to clinical variation. Outline the 4 evolutionary forces as mechanisms controlling gene frequencies in a given population. Describe the different levels of human adaptability using skin colour and adaptation to high altitudes as examples. Explore various ways human biological diversity has been interpreted. Long term evolutionary changes: origins of new species and their diversification across time and space. Short term evolutionary changes: occur within a given species over relatively few generations, ex: human biological diversity. Combination (synthesis) of darwinian ideas about natural selection and mendelian ideas about heredity: this came about in the 50"s eugenics (kind of like human pedigrees), neo-darwinism, ex: undermined the biological concept of race . Population genetics: gene pool and gene frequencies, alleles: different forms a gene may take. Polymorphic alleles accounts for most genetic variation across populations: different populations possess different proportions of the same set of alleles, ex: abo blood group.
