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17.6: Review Questions

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  • Page ID
    191591

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    • How is the study of your ancestors biopolitical, not just biological? Does that make it less scientific or differently scientific?
    • What was gained by reducing organisms to genotypes and species to gene pools? What is gained by reintroducing bodies and species into evolutionary studies?
    • How do genetic or molecular studies complement anatomical studies of evolution?
    • How are you reducible to your ancestry? If you could meet your ancestors from the year 1700 (and you would have well over a thousand of them!), would their lives be meaningfully similar to yours? Would you even be able to communicate with them?
    • The molecular biologist François Jacob argued that evolution is more like a tinkerer than an engineer. In what ways do we seem like precisely engineered machinery, and in what ways do we seem like jerry-rigged or improvised contraptions?
    • How might biological anthropology contribute to future developments in evolutionary theory?

    This page titled 17.6: Review Questions is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jonathan Marks & Adam P. Johnson (Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.