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Definition
| Study of humans, past and present. It is a field-based discipline. |
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| Subfields of Anthropology |
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Definition
- Sociocultural/Cultural
- Biological/Physical
- Archaeology
- Linguistic |
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| Anthropological Perspective |
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Definition
- Holistic: Integrates all known
- Comparative: Similarities and differences between human societies
- Field Based: Contact with people, sites, animals, etc.
- Evolutionary: Biological and cultural change |
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| What do Anthropologists do? |
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| They explore human society, cultures, and physical diversity through time and space. |
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| The speciality of anthropology that looks at human beings as biological organisms and tries to discover what characteristics make them different from other organisms and what characteristics they share. |
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| The study of nonhuman primates, the closest living relatives of human beings. |
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| The search for fossilized remains of humanity's earliest ancestors. |
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| Consists of beliefs, traditions, customs, and ideas. It adapts with culture and is central. |
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| An extended period of close involvement with the people in whose language or way of life anthropologists are interested, during which anthropologists ordinarily collect most of their data. |
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- Material: Consists of material objects themselves; information recorded about them, or scientific measurements made of them.
- Inferred: Material evidence plus interpretation. |
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| A coherently organized series of testable hypotheses used to explain a body of material evidence. |
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| The set of testable hypotheses that assert that living organisms can change over time and give rise to new kinds of organisms, with the result that all organisms ultimately share a common ancestry. (Example: finches and fruit flies) |
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Definition
A two step, mechanistic explanation of how descent with modification takes place:
(1) Every generation, variant individuals are generated within a species due to genetic mutation
(2) Those variant individuals best suited to the current environment survive and produce more offspring than other variants. |
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| A measure of an organism's ability to compete in the struggle for existence. Those individuals whose variant traits better equip them to compete with other members of their species for limited resources are more likely to survive and reproduce than individuals who lack such traits. |
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| The shaping of any useful feature of an organism, regardless of its origin. |
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| The shaping of useful features of an organism by natural selection for the function they now perform. |
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| The shaping of a useful feature of an organism by natural selection to perform one function and the later reshaping of it by different selection pressures to perform a new function. |
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| The view that heredity is based on non-blending, single-particle genetic inheritance. |
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| The scientific study of biological heredity. |
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Definition
| Portion or portions of the DNA molecule that code for proteins that shape phenotypic traits. |
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| Sets of paired bodies in the nucleus of cells that are made of DNA and contain the heredity genetic information that organisms pass on to their offspring. |
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Definition
| All the different forms that a particular gene might take. |
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| DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) |
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Definition
| The structure that carries the genetic heritage of an organism as a kind of blueprint for the organism's construction and development. |
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| The sum total of all the genetic information about an organism, carried on the chromosomes in the cell nucleus. |
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| A pattern of variation involving polygeny in which phenotypic traits grade imperceptibly from one member of the population to another without sharp breaks. |
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| A pattern of phenotypic variation in which the phenotype (ex: flower color) exhibits sharp breaks from one member of the population to the next. |
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| The phenomenon whereby many genes are responsible for producing a phenotypic trait, such as skin color. |
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| The creation of a new allele for a gene when the portion of the DNA molecule to which it corresponds is suddenly altered. |
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| A portion of the DNA strand responsible for encoding specific parts of an organism's biological makeup. |
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| The phenomenon that occurs when part of one chromosome breaks off and reattaches itself to a different chromosome during meiosis; also called incomplete linkage. |
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| An inheritance pattern in which unrelated phenotypic traits regularly occur together because the genes responsible for those co-occurring traits are passed on together on the same chromosome. |
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| The phenomenon whereby a single gene may affect more than one phenotypic trait. |
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| A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that describes how anthropology tries to integrate all that is known about human beings and their activities at the highest and most inclusive level. *This draws anthropologists together when their speculations normally divide them.* |
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| A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that requires anthropologists to consider similarities and differences in as wide a range of human societies as possible before generalizing about human nature, human society, or the human past. |
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| A characteristic of the anthropological perspective that requires anthropologists to place their observations about human nature, human society, or the human past in a temporal framework that takes into consideration change over time. |
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| Sets of learned behavior and ideas that human beings acquire as members of society. Human beings use culture to adapt to and to transform the world in which they live. |
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| Organisms whose defining features are codetermined by biological and cultural factors. |
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(1) Social groupings that allegedly reflect biological differences.
(2) A folk category of the english language that refers to discrete groups of human beings who are uniformly separated from one another on the basis of arbitrarily selected phenotypic traits. |
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| People in a particular culture who work with anthropologists and provide them with insights about their way of life. (Also called respondents, teachers, or friends). |
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| Dr. Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr is the title character of the series of movies. He is a college professor of archaeology. |
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| The comparative study of two or more cultures. |
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| An anthropologist's written or filmed description of a particular culture. |
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| The belief that ones own way of life is natural or correct and, indeed, the only true way of being fully human. |
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| The specialty of anthropology concerned with the study of human languages. |
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| The system of arbitrary vocal symbols we use to encode our experiences of the world and of one another. |
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| The long stretch of time before the development of writing. |
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| Portable objects modified by human beings. |
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| Specialists who use information gathered from the other anthropological specialties to solve practical cross-cultural problems. |
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| The specialty of anthropology that concerns itself with human health and the factors that contribute to disease or illness and the ways that human populations deal with disease or illness. |
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| Stories whose truth seems self-evident because they do such a good job of integrating personal experiences with a wider set of assumptions about the way society, or the world in general, must operate. |
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| The invention of explanations about what things are, how they work, and how they came to be that can be tested against evidence in the world itself. |
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| Basic, unquestioned understandings about the way the world works. |
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| What is seen when a particular part of the world is examined with great care. Scientists use two different kinds of evidence: material and inferred. |
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Definition
| Consists of material objects themselves, information recorded about them, or scientific measurements made of them. |
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| Material evidence plus interpretation. |
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| Statements that assert a particular connection between fact and interpretation. |
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| The ability of scientific hypotheses to be matched against nature to see whether they are confirmed or refuted. |
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| The separation of observation and reporting from the researcher's wishes. |
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Definition
| The remains of life-forms that had been preserved in the earth for a long time. |
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| The belief, derived from Plato, in fixed ideas, or "forms," that exist perfect and unchanging in eternity. Actual objects in the temporal world, such as cows or horses, are seen as imperfect material realizations of the ideal form that defines their kind. |
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| A comprehensive framework for interpreting the world, based on Aristotelian principles and elaborated during the middle ages, in which every kind of living organism was linked to every other kind in an enormous, divinely created chain. An organism differed from the kinds immediately above it and below it on the chain by the least possible degree. |
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| The notion that natural disasters, such as floods, are responsible for the extinction of species, which are then replaced by new species. |
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| The notion that an understanding of current processes can be used to reconstruct the past history of the earth, based on the assumption that the same gradual processes of erosion and uplift that change the earth's surface today had also been at work in the past. |
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| A classification in biology, the classification of various kinds of organisms. |
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| The level of the Linnaean taxonomy in which different species are grouped together on the basis of their similarities to one another. |
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Definition
(1) For Linnaeus, a Platonic "natural kind" defined in terms of its essence.
(2) For modern biologists, a reproductive community of populations (reproductively isolated from others) that occupies a specific niche in nature. |
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Definition
| Darwin's claim that similar living species must all have had a common ancestor. |
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Definition
| The Darwinian theory of evolution, which assumes that variant members of a species respond differently to environmental challenges. Those variants that are more successful (“fitter”) survive and reproduce more offspring, who inherit the traits that made their parents fit. |
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Term
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Definition
| A measure of an organism's ability to compete in the struggle for existence. Those individuals whose variant traits better equip them to compete with other members of their species for limited resources are more likely to survive and reproduce than individuals who lack such traits. |
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Definition
| A theory of heredity suggesting that an organism's traits are passed on from one generation to the next in the form of multiple distinct particles given off by all parts of the organism, different proportions of which get passed on to offspring via sperm and egg. |
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Definition
| A principle of Mendelian inheritance in which an individual gets the particle (gene) for each trait (i.e.: one-half of the required pair) from each parent. |
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| Principle of Independent Assortment |
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Definition
| A principle of Mendelian Inheritance in which each pair of particles (genes) separates independently of every other pair when germ cells (egg and sperm) are formed. |
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Definition
| Describes a fertilized egg that receives the same particle (or allele) from each parent for a particular trait. |
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Definition
| Describes a fertilized egg that receives a different particle (or allele) from each parent for the same trait. |
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