start of my reflections

Today lsm3261 lecture gave me a new insight to what I’ve been doing for the past 3 years and yah, realized a few answers that I’ve been searching for in life. Makes me see things in a different perspectives. Questioning is the answer. Teaching is not just about making student understand a concept or theory. I decided keep track of all the interesting stuff I’ve learnt bio mod this year. only the year 3 mod seems interesting. How sad!

Evolution.
Of altruism and social behavior- it’s upsetting me that our caring and sacrificial acts are actually not that selfless, but entirely for increasing our fitness ( to pass on our genes). Imagine your parents are nice to you because they wanna ensure that their genes are passed down, your spouses are nice to you becos they wanna have more offspring. Then what’s love man? Something that’s evolved to ensure our lineage? Oh my. Quite laughable yah? But it makes sense.

Bees/ ants/ mole rat/ termites are all social animals, with some sort of a hierarchy consisting of queen (egg laying machine), worker (sterile slaves), male (sperm contributor). The worker gave up their reproduction ability to take care of all the offsprings of the queen, in another words their siblings. It doesn’t make sense if evolution fitness is all about passing down one’s gene right? Let’s look that the genetic relationship between parents and offspring: 50% = genetic relationship between sibling. Get it? So actually, it’s more efficient and more cost effective to be like a reproduction factory assembly line to have specific roles and hence, lead to increase in ‘yield’.

Of my project on evolution of encephalization of human- a change in diet and increase in quality of food resulted in the increase in relative brain use of our ancestors. Oh well, will update later.

Dev biology
It seems like all fields of biology are calling themselves the essential one and the key one to understanding life. Whatever. I just think it’s just a ego boosting thing. Every field links up to give the big picture. Maybe it’s just how useful is it for the use of humans. The value. Imagine a research that has nothing to do with human VS one tat will cure human disease. It will make hell lots of difference.

Life form and function
Why land mammals evolved to have toes? And in many 5 digits are observed? Is it the ultimate design but why?