Hi everyone!
My name is Nicole Nelson and I’m a sophomore, majoring in
Molecular and Cellular Biology and minoring in Anthropology. When looking for
classes this semester, I stumbled upon this course and thought it sounded both
intriguing and valuable. I believe gaining different perspectives to biology
would be extremely beneficial to my overall understanding of biology. I also
love how anthropology causes you to think of the consequences for society and
the bigger picture that are not frequently discussed in biology courses which
often focus on only the specifics and not necessarily populations and people as
whole.
So I did some research and here are some blogs that I found
particularly interesting:
In the last blog, I really enjoyed the article about
epigenetics because it was a topic that I was recently exposed to and thought
that it was a perfect example of what I described above. I had only really been
introduced to the concepts that described the little picture, such as the
addition of methyl groups to the DNA structure to signal the genes that need to
be transcribed according to the environment that the organism is found in.
Although the blog describes that research in epigenetics may unlock some
secrets to the human body, Buchanan also explains that it will not be the
end-all-be-all to genetics, it will only be the next step to further
understanding. This is contrary to what many political scientists claim, that
voting patterns and poverty can be tracked to epigenetics. I think these
consequences are so important because they are the whole reason that we strive
to discover new ideas in biology or any other field is to improve life and
society through these findings by using the little picture to improve the big
picture.
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