Today marks the beginning of the Spring semester at Wellesley. I am teaching two courses this semester, Introduction to Physical Anthropology (Anth 204), which I teach every Spring, and Human Biology and Society (Anth 314), a new upper level seminar that will be focused on personal genomics this semester. As I did in the Fall, here is a brief description of the two courses with links to the preliminary syllabus for each.
This is my fourth go-round with the intro class, and for the first time, I have not made major changes to it. For the second time in a row I am using two books for the course (in addition to an assortment of articles), Jonathan Marks’ “Alternative Introduction to Biological Anthropology” and “Evolution in Four Dimensions” by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. I try to structure the intro course around several related questions:
* How does evolution operate?
* How do we understand human variation from an evolutionary perspective?
* How can the study of humans inform us as to how evolution works?
In reality, the course gets split roughly equally between four subject areas; straight evolutionary theory, human behavior and biology, primates and comparative perspectives, and the human fossil record. Jon Marks’ book covers the basic material associated with the subjects in what I find an insightful and pretty irreverent sort of way. It lacks the basic pedagogical tools that go along with a lot of more traditional textbooks (e.g. charts, tables, pictures), but with the advantage of being both cheaper and more on focus. The absence of these more traditional tools force/allow me to create my own supplementary material.
I like Jablonka and Lamb’s book primarily as a tool to get students thinking about how evolution operates in the specific case of humans, and how the study of humans can help elucidate the evolutionary processes somewhat unique to human prehistory. Their book puts a strong emphasis on so-called “non-Darwinian” mechanisms of inheritance (epigenetic, behavioral, symbolic), something that has gotten some push back from some prominent evolutionary biologists (see Jerry Coyne, here). Whether or not the mechanisms outlined by Jablonka and Lamb are significant operators in the larger biological world is somewhat irrelevant to me, though, as in the course, and personally, I am solely interested in the evolution of humans. And there are a number of strange things about human evolution, many of them focused on the development of the human brain as an adaptive structure that can accomodate really interesting and complex evolutionary dynamics.
My other course, Human Biology and Society, is new and, I think, will be quite interesting. I outlined the basics of the course a couple of weeks ago as I was finalizing my reading list for the semester. Patricia Williams, a law professor at Columbia (and a Wellesley alum!), had a nice essay last month that covers a lot of the issues I hope we will cover in the course (h/t Jennifer Wagner for the original link). Given the increasing availability of personal genetic/genomic data, how does this affect our understanding of the human condition? How does DNA technology change our understandings of the boundaries of an individual in space and time? How does genetic sequencing tell us not only about who we are, but who we might be come as a predictive mechanism of human health and disease? Students will have the opportunity, as one of the “texts” for the course, to get personal sequencing through 23andme.com, something that I hope will add a new level of pedagogical engagement to the course.
Hopefully it will all go well. The fun starts tomorrow. Here are the two syllabi:
* Introduction to Physical Anthropology (Anthropology 204)
* Human Biology and Society (Anthropology 314)
