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Anthropology
Biochemistry
Rocket Science
Botany
Engineering
I have always had an interest since I could remember.
When I was five I got up for the first space shuttle launch at o' dark early and watched the Columbia roar into orbit. I was quickly in the back yard building corrugated roofing aluminum fuselages and wings with fencing boards. Dissecting the frogs from the field behind my house was a distraction, looking at the way sinew attaches to bones and muscle was of intimate interest. This was also to the distaste of my sister who would run ranting from the jars of snails and bugs that I would drag around. Independent interests are pretty ingrained, I found 13 helix aspersa (oui escargo!) this spring 2003 while hiking up 49th from Ballard. They are happy in a terrarium with garden clipping and spinach. I'm waiting for them to breed right now. Hermaphrodites!
When in college I studied anthropology for awhile. I really like studying humans. They have a few more layers of social interest than other organisms and there are benefits to undrstanding them. I focused on the biology and speciation events in my studies with Dr. Tracer at the UW. I was very bummed when I heard that they sis not give him tenure at the U. I heard that he went someplace back east. I was interested in the Neanderthal speciation event and the dissappearance of them when "anatomically modern humans" appeared in Europe. Two opponents on how this happened are Dr. Mildred Wolpoff and Dr. Chris Springer.
Wolpoff is a proponent of the regional gradualism model of speciation for humans. In his model there were several diasporas from Africa to the rest of the world and the people that ended up in their respective places in the world gradually evolved over time to have regional characteristics. They were kept from complete speciation by migration events and interbreeding along the edges of regional territories. Neanderthals are an example of a regional morphology that adapted local to a frozen iceage Europe. When the iceage receeded and more movement of populations was possible the selection for the short robust Neanderthal body was relaxed and by breeding with other regional morphologies many but not all of the characteristics relaxed. Wolpoff and others have pointed out many properly dated transitional remains. Several have been found in the Levant region of the middle east and most recently as in the Iberian Peninsula. There are theories that civilization occured when the cold adapted Homo sapiens neanderthalensis with their technological innovations for surviving in the cold in small groups taught the more socially adapted and communicative Homo sapiens sapiens how to think about the materials around them for adaptation rather than relying on their large tribe to survive.
More on Dr. Chris Springer next time....
Dr. Green was also very good, he was more of a cultural anthropologist (that whole gradualism thing) than a physical anthropologist.
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