THE HUMAN PAST

The Human Past

Section A.1.

1. Discuss the rise of the scientific paradigm in the 19th century.

Scientific Revolution

This model of scientific thinking historically addressed the problem of knowledge from the perspective of the eternal, immutable, perfect, original nature. In this thought, knowledge is viewed from”ontology" busy in solving the most common feature of all existence, his being, the search was directed necessarily to find answers to such questions as: What is necessarily needed for that one thing there? Are there different ways to "exist"?

While these questions have been raised always in philosophy and metaphysics was responsible for answering them, with the creation of the term ontology, German rationalism of Wolff and Kant generated a new "object" of knowledge by placing it in the apprehension of general characteristics of things within the human spirit, where you find the terms "transcendent" that make things to be true objects of knowledge (Clarke, 2000). The term "revolution" is in common use since the eighteenth century. In the Encyclopedia, many authors describe the contributions of scientists such as Newton as revolutions in science, that is to say, as initiating the beginning of an era . The direction is changing in the writings of scientists, science historians and philosophers. Thus, Kant describes the transition from a geocentric to heliocentric as the Copernican revolution in his Critique of Pure Reason.

How did this paradigm influence the development of evolutionary thought?

The evolutionary thinking, the idea that species change over time has its roots in antiquity, the ideas of ancient Greeks, the Romans, and Chinese and in medieval Islamic science. However, until the 18th century, Western biological thinking was dominated by essentialism, the belief that each species has essential characteristics that do not change. This view has been challenged during the Enlightenment, when the evolutionary cosmology and the mechanical philosophy extended from science to natural history. Naturalists began to focus their attention on species diversity. The emergence of paleontology and the concept of extinction further undermined the static view of nature. In the early 19th century, Jean Baptiste Lamarck proposed a theory of transmutation of species , the first fully formed scientific theory of evolution (Kuhn, 2001) (Handa, 2000).

Section 2.1

Describe the basic structure of the DNA molecule and how it works? How does this molecular knowledge about genetics advance our understanding of what we learned from Mendel about how genes combine?

DNA is an acronym for the medical term deoxyribonucleic acid, a term that is defined as the material that forms the genetics of the human body and all other animals alike. The division and storage of DNA is generally divided into two categories: one is the Nuclear DNA that is situated in the cell nucleus, while the remainder is termed the mtDNA or the Mitochondrial DNA, located in the mitochondria (cell biology). DNA works as the foundation of all living beings; from blacks to whites, to reptiles to mammals, etc. all of them have specifically and statistically designed for the purpose of developing habits and ...