Introduction and summary
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| The area in Botswana today - definitely not fertile |
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Response: What is your opinion?
Modern science continually amazes me. Today, we know more about our origins than any other humans in history have ever known, and unlike the stories told by religions, the creation stories of physics, chemistry, biology and other sciences are solidly founded on verifiable facts and sound reasoning. I had already known that Mitochondrial Eve, the last common female ancestor of every human being alive today, lived around 150,000 years ago, and I had already been amazed that anthropoligists had been able to narrow the area down to Africa after decades of careful work. If we look at other sciences, we now know more about the universe around us, including that it's almost 14 billion years old, than anyone would have imagined possible when I was born last century, and the rate of new discoveries keeps accelerating, as my ever smarter smart phones demonstrate. What might we know tomorrow?But as I read and thought about the article, I was also reminded how the mathematical tools used to recreate evolutionary histories from modern DNA can be applied in very different areas. Last term in one of my classes we read an article about how these statitical analyses can be used to trace fairy tales back through evolving human languages for thousands of years as groups split like species do to create new languages and new cultures, a process that is still going on in every living language and the culture it encodes.
In fact, if I had to pick just one scientific discovery, I might choose Darwin's theory of evolution, which he published in 1859, as the most important ever. Evolution is not so deep as the theories of modern physics, or so Earth shattering as the Copernican revolution that moved us humans from the centre of the universe, but by connecting us to every other living thing through the mindless operation of perfectly blind natural processes, it showed us our place in nature and finally helped us get over the need for stories of gods and other supernatural things to explain the living wonder of the world we inhabit.
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Although I had not written my response, I decided to post it as another example as soon as I had finished my summary. As usual, my first draft of the summary was too long, but only a little. It was 122 words. The current summary in my words, after the usual five or six revisions, is 116 words which is safely within the 120 word limit.
ReplyDeleteI've also written a new title. The first titles we wrote in class were temporary. It's usual to give your work a title after it's finished because that's when you know what it finally says. I might change mine again, and I still have to write the response here first.
And as usual, my response, which is 350 words here, tool much less time to write than the summary.
Delete