Sunday, May 24, 2009
Electrocardiography.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
WHY STUDY HUMAN BIOLOGY?
Human biology is an interdisciplinary academic field of biology, biological anthropology, nutrition and medicine which focuses on humans; it is closely related to primate biology, and a number of other fields. The human biology major was founded in 1970 at Stanford University.
[edit] History
The first man to ever use the term Human biology was Ernst Freiherr von Blomberg (°1821 - +1903). Born in Hamburg, he attended the Academisches Gymnasium where he studied Evangelic Theology and the University to study Biology. At the Fachschule of Lübeck he held the chair of Zoology from 1856 until his retirement in 1896. His writings, though obscured by theological prejudice, have some interest: in 1869 he publishes a work called “Die Verwandlung im Prinzipus: Thiere, Maenschen und Ihren Gottlosen Vereinen”. It is considered to be the first book on anthrozoology. In his course of 1891 "Beiträge zur Studien der Thierverwandlungen", he unintentionally coined the term Humanbiologie. Today, this term is used on an entirely different basis, but his use had the same roots of research, albeit distorted by religious motives.
BUILDING UPON KNOWLEDGE FOUNDATIONS
There's no reason to think that human beings in ancient times were any simpler or stupider as a group or as individuals than they are today. They did have a much smaller pool of accumulated knowledge to build upon, so you might say that they were more ignorant than we are today.
But certain aspects of humanness were undoubtedly just as powerful then as now: the need to know why things happen the way they do, and the need to break information down into manageable and useful bits, and the need to label things, place them in categories, and explain their relationships. Of all the abilities humans have in different amounts than other animals, it may their greater sense of connection, particularly of how cause relates to effect, that really is the basis of science.
You can see aspects of human organization in how people have investigated Nature - we look for family, tribe, and nation types of relationships, in patterns that match the patterns in our societies. If Modern Science is a product of "Western Society" - which is arguable, of course - its intrinsic patterns may just be an outgrowth of the level of structure and coordination and planning needed for a continent of cities and the support infrastructure that allowed those cities to interact meaningfully with a globe of trade. Isn't the organization of one remarkably similar to the organization of the other? Is that a coincidence, are there many varied ways to perform "science"?
The ideas of PostModernism, which are applied to everything from art to politics to science, deals with the idea that all human endeavors and discoveries take forms which must be influenced by the cultures that produce them. In science, they argue that the classic approach, the Scientific Method, is just one way to determine how the world works, and that other cultures are free to find their "truth" in other ways. Western science supporters argue back that the strong role of logic (based on math, which really doesn't show cultural variance) in science sets it apart from other disciplines - but then, they're coming to the defense of something they strongly believe. It is never bad to remember, however, that science is made - or at least interpreted - by the scientists, who (whether they like it or not) are products of their cultures. All of the major ideas of science, from Lamarck and Darwin through Einstein and Margulis and Hawking, have a bit of each person's world and worldview embedded in them.
Early Biology is a mixture of a need to understand the practical - humans had a practical grasp of genetics millennia before Austrian monk Gregor Mendel began to work out the details - and a compulsion to see the Big Picture. From a simple level, as the concept that a dog, a wolf, and a fox were different types of animals but could be joined together in the smaller but definable type of Canines, to a larger but understandable concept that living things with similar forms and functions could be placed in groups together - the creatures of the water, the creatures of the air, the slithering legless things, the things that grow from the ground, et cetera. It seems a simplistic way of grouping things together, but one suspects that it was convenient, and that the ancients who really used the system probably realized that it had some limitations, as users of today's systems do.
Early on, the major groupings of living things were two simple broad groups: the Animals, things that moved and ate, and the Plants, which didn't move or appear to eat (plus the minerals, which were not as obviously unliving as we see them today). The methods by which living things were classified (an aspect of biology called taxonomy) were not widely coordinated until the 17th and 18th Century, culminating in the development of the binomial nomenclature system by Carolus Linnaeus in the mid-1700's.
EXPLAINING HOW LIFE WORKS - DISTANT HISTORY
Human beings are born with a need to understand things, it's how we learn and how we teach - just try to teach something that you really don't understand! In explaining things that are difficult to grasp, we have a long history of using what we do sort of know to explain what we really don't quite understand.
There are other ways to look at this, but one possible view of human history is that we see Nature in the terms that make the most sense at a given time. Older societies, people without the technology to strongly affect their surroundings, saw their world in terms of the things with Power: Nature Spirits, with motivations one might guess natural processes to have if they were somewhat human, but also with the limitations that come from existing as wind, or forests, or the sun above. Later, as humans gained more ability to manipulate their own environment, as power over Nature became something in their grasp, the forces of Nature as they perceived it became much more human, in form and personality, although much more powerful - the human-like gods controlled those larger aspects of the world the same way that humans controlled the small aspects of theirs, and animal-based spirits became more human and less powerful. Today, the idea of control-from-above has slipped out of the realm of just explaining external Nature and has become more concerned with Human Nature, with those aspects of Life and Afterlife that still seem unexplainable, and the forces are less human and more like the forces of Consciousness itself. Meanwhile, centuries of small successes in explaining this or that piece of the Big Nature Puzzle have moved humanity, or a sizable fraction of it, from seeing Nature as something that can not really be understood, that must be explained in supernatural terms, to the conviction that it all can be broken down into tiny graspable bits, and all of the workings can be analyzed. We like the feeling that this has moved us somehow closer to the Truth, and scientists probably feel some of the same sense of Specialness that used to be the province of priests, of being more In-The-Know than the rest. But are we really any closer to some knowable Truth?
WHY STUDY HUMAN BIOLOGY?
Human Biology I (ANHB1101) and Human Biology II (ANHB1102) give you a sound understanding of the human condition - our structure, development, genetics and evolution.
It provides you with:
- A strong foundation for the study of Human Science, complementing other first year units offered by:
Anthropology
Archaeology
Human Movement
Geography
Linguistics
Psychology
- A broad introduction to Biomedical Science, including basic cell and molecular biology
- The prerequisites for further studies in all Biomedical Science areas in the subsequent years of your degree.
Anatomy & Human Biology
Biochemistry
Microbiology
Molecular Biology
Pathology
Physiology
Pharmacology
