First Blog Post BIOL 520
My name is Megan Bordewick and I am from Garden City, KS. I am a senior here at K-State and am planning on going to vet school at K-state or at Colorado State or Michigan State University. My passions include the subjects of biology and medicine and I hope on day to turn that passion into a career as a Small animal/exotic veterinarian. Working with guinea pigs, rabbits, birds, and many other cute and fascinating animals would be a stressful but ideal life for me. Anything about biology is fascinating to me, but the fascinating thing about evolution is the way life has emerged into such a variety of amazing creatures that live just about everywhere on earth.
Biology has been influenced so much by modern medicine in the past few thousand years and modern medicine has probably influenced human evolution in many ways too. We live longer and we are exposed to many different environments, animals, and pathogens from all over the world. Some of the ways humans are currently or recently changed are included in this article Humans are still evolving: 3 examples of recent adaptations (inverse.com). One of the ways we are evolving that is mentioned in this article is our body temperature cooling down. The researchers theorized this was due to inflammation decreasing due to better health/less inflammation over the past 200 years. Other human evolutionary findings are due to diet and environmental change. Another example of human evolution is lactose intolerance/tolerance. The evolution of human and animal communication is also an interesting topic to research. The physics and physiology of underwater animal communication is fascinating and one fish I've recently learned about is fish in the mormyridae family who communicate with one another using weak pulses of electricity (These Fish Speak With Electricity, But They Talk Just Like Us (sciencealert.com). Over thousands of years, human genetics have changed to allow lactose to be metabolized, which allows humans to drink milk past infancy. Humans are one of or the only mammals that drink milk from another animal in adulthood. Pathogenic evolution is quite an interesting subject to get into due to COVID-19 if you want to understand how pathogens change and evolve to become more/less manageable over time.
(fish from the Mormyridae family)
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.britannica.com%2Fanimal%2Fmormyrid&psig=AOvVaw18aOMJ6Z6B4uZSA8CXW3hi&ust=1630440269289000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAwQjhxqFwoTCICzi8zF2fICFQAAAAAdAAAAABAX
