Life Science. What did I learn? A few things I suppose, although not a lot of new things.
Intelligent design, the topic of the documentary first presented in class, was introduced and discussed by Sir Espinas during our sophomore year in Pisay. ID is nothing but a mere rework of creationism, and remains to be attached to a religious ideology. It is a proposed theory which doesn’t have any means of supporting its claim. It simply just cannot be tested.
Evolution as well was a Biology 1 topic. Adaptation and natural selection are major driving forces of this process. Certain habitats require specific features for a population to thrive successfully. In order to keep up, they must develop these required traits, or face the risk of becoming extinct. That, I believe is the main point of evolution. It is for every living thing to survive successfully wherever they’re living.
One new thing I learned though was the Hardy-Weinberg Principle. It states that in a population, both allele and genotype frequencies remain constant from generation to generation. That is, if the principle’s conditions are met.
- RANDOM MATING
- NO MUTATIONS
- NO NET MOVEMENT
- EQUALLY VIABLE ALLELES
- LARGE POPULATION
For the alleles, the dominant allele frequency is denoted by p, and the recessive with q. These frequencies follow the equation p^2 + 2pq + q^2 = 1.
However, as I researched more on the topic, I found something quite funny. This principle, however, seemed impossible to apply to humans. By default, people tend to look for beautiful partners. This disturbs the supposedly random mating condition. =))
