anthropology+ human evolution

• Biological evolution is the change in the properties of organisms over the course of generations, passed via genetic material into the next generation.
• Ontogeny, or development/growth, of organisms is not evolution.
• Plato believed that variation is an accidental imperfection.
• Humans are genetically more diverse within populations than between populations.
• Humans are less genetically differentiated than other mammals.
• Humans have more genetic variation within a population than chimpanzees do between subspecies.
• Genetic diversity in humans follows a gradient, indicating that there is not a "fixed" classification possible.
• Aristotle believed that species have fixed properties, such as humans being able to talk and walk on two feet.
• Christians believe that God's creation, the "great chain of being", must be permanent and unchanging as change implies imperfection.
• Carolus Linnaeus proposed a catalogue plan of creation, known as systema naturae, for the classification of animals and plants.
• Lamarck proposed that species originated spontaneously, that evolution aims to get more complex, and that there are no common ancestors between species.
• Darwin proposed that all species have descended from one “original” forms of life, that there are five theories of natural selection, and that characteristics of lineages change over time.
• Different species arose from one single common ancestor, according to Darwin.
• Costly punishment: punishment and threat are strategies to enforce cooperation.
• Indirect reciprocity: observer recognizes what others are doing and pick who cooperates.
• Elastic population: extrapolative offspring by cooperation.
• Global competition: cooperation will lead to higher success probability.
• Iteration: learning and reciprocal interaction.
• Tit-for-tat: players react to opponents last move (cooperate first and then copy other).
• Inelastic population: individuals can't grow by helping, as it indirectly harms others.
• Prisoner’s dilemma: Snowdrift game is better if you defect in both scenarios.
• Win-stay-lose-shift: players react to the opponents and their own last move (if you win you repeat, if you lose you change strategy).
• Conditional cooperation: individuals can decide whether to cooperate or not.
• Selection mainly acts on the individual as the carrier of genes and not on a whole group.
• Generalized reciprocity: own decisions are based on previous positive interaction.
• Natural selection is the process where only those individuals who are adapted best will survive and get into the next generation, also known as survival of the fittest.
• Variational evolution implies that individuals in an evolving population vary from one to another, and that these variations may accumulate during evolution due to a sorting process by which some variants become either more or less common.
• A phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, represents the evolutionary relationships among a set of organisms, called taxa, with the tips of the tree representing groups of descendent taxa and the nodes on the tree representing the common ancestors of those descendants.
• Bacteria often interact through the secretion of small molecules, with competition involving the release of toxins to fight each other, and cooperation involving the sharing of resources through enzymes.
• Tumors consist of multiple cell lineages, making them unique and hard to treat, and interaction between tumor lineages can be either negative or positive.
• Peto’s paradox states that there is no correlation between cancer incidences and body mass longevity.
• Life history trade-offs involve dark skin, having fewer babies, growing up in a clean environment, and evolutionary mismatch.
• Elephants have 20 tumor suppressor genes and a better DNA repair mechanism than mice, leading to fewer mutations.
• A bottom-up approach to microbiome assembly involves ecological dynamics, evolutionary dynamics, and identifying forces that lead to healthy microbiomes.
• Cancer evolution involves a multistep mutational process, is associated with chromosomal instability, and tumor mutations need to be on both copies to be harmful.
• Cancer therapy involves targeting selfish or neutral cells and cooperational cell lines, which provide services to others.
• Coalescence analysis allows tracking back to the most recent common ancestor.
• Microbial interaction involves the assembly of microbiomes through a top-down approach, starting with complex samples, sequencing, descriptive analyses, and correlation with disease.
• The cancer lottery involves lifestyle factors such as diet and smoking, genetic disposition, exposure to mutagenic agents, and evolutionary trade-offs.
• Evolutionary trade-offs involve DNA double strand breaks, tissue regeneration, and inflammation.